#15th Century Italian Longsword

[kultofathena]

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Tatami Mats Destroyed ☑️

@thejade.eye with The Balaur Arms – 15th Century Italian Longsword.

Re imagined by LK Chen, who was able to achieve outstanding balance and performance characteristics with the use of substantial distal taper and faithfully executed hollow-ground blade.

[greed-the-dorkalicious]

With Pride Month starting, lately I keep thinking about what a shame it is that there are so many exclusionist and arophobic wlw, who prefer to shame allo aros because Huuuuuh Sex Without Romance Bad And Scary, when they COULD be bonding with us over Girls.

Like. I like girls! You like girls! Let’s be friends! No? Well ok Susan, but you’re never going to get to see MY goth tiddies so rest in rip

[maloosh-baloosh64]

Happy Pride Month! I made some pride knights in Mordhau!

I really enjoy playing Mordhau, and I've slowly come to the realization that I might be bi, so I wanted to make some pride themed armor loadouts.

LGBTQ

Somewhat based off the elite knight set from dark souls. This one was the hardest to get right because of all the wonderful colors in the pride flag. They're wielding a Claymore.... or a Gaymore, if you will.

Lesbian

She's rockin some beautiful 15th century Italian plate armor. On top of that she's got the Terf Slayer battle axe, based on the axe in the original lesbian pride flag.

Gay

He's wearing 14th century brigandine armor. He's got a longsword and two daggers.

Bisexual

The bisexual wears 16th century landsknecht half armor. What it lacks in protection it makes up for in cost and weight. In his hands is the mighty Zweihander.... the BI-hander... haha cuz bi means... two.

Pansexual

Or the PANSknecht if you will lol :3 But they also happen to wear landsknecht gear like the Bisexual knight, because bi and pan people are both fucking cool and have a lot in common. They carry a zweihander with them given that it is the signature weapon of the landsknecht.

Trans

The trans knight wears a joupon with a 14th century breastplate over it. In her hands is the Dusk moon halberd, a weapon that can serve many purposes.

Non-Binary

Could not decide if I wanted their armor to be black or white so I posted both pics. They wear 16th century greenwhich half armor with some colorful leggings and skirt below. They also have a Messer, for no other reason other than i think it looks cool.

Asexual

The ace knight is armed with a mACE. haha get it? He is also wearing a 14th century knightly coat of plates. I wish Mordhau had a Spade icon for your shield but alas they do not, (it would've been cool and funny cuz like, ace of spades).

Aromantic

Last but certainly not least is the Aromantic knight. He wears 16th/15th century Polish Hussar armor, known for its elaborate wings and articulated Cuirass. He also has a bow and AROw haha oh im so funny and original. But also as a back up weapon he wields a falchion.

That's all the pride knights I've made so far. I worked hard on these so let me know what ya'll think! Happy pride!

[mearchy]

Nicolò di Genova - Sword

Today I, a history nerd and relative newbie to the TOG fandom, want to talk about Nicky’s sword. Warning: This post is long.

(ik there are some history-centric TOG pages out there that may have covered this much better than I will, so feel free to leave a link!)

Okay, so just to clarify, we are talking about this thing:

In both the comics and the movie, Nicky’s sword appears to be a two-handed longsword (theoretically, longswords are two-handed while broadswords are not but a lot of people ignore this so... whatever). It has a T-type looking flared pommel and a curved quillon with a pointy bit in the middle (quillon is the crossbar above the sword grip, pommel is the flared part at the base of the grip). 

The implication, which I have seen expanded on in a lot of fics, is that this is a 1099-era sword that Nicky is fighting with, that is representative of the time period he comes from. (I would like to note that this is true for Joe- his kilij scimitar is in fact, a historically accurate weapon that would have likely been used in Jerusalem during the First Crusade. Kudos to Rucka for not just choosing the more well-known scimitar blade types, or following Wikipedia’s shitty and incorrect assertion that the kilij was solely an Ottoman blade. Then again, getting it right could have very well been an accident. ANYway.)

Here’s the issue: Nicky’s canon sword doesn’t really... exist? Historically speaking. To start with, Crusaders didn’t use two-handed swords. In fact, the two-handed longsword as we know it wasn’t introduced until at least the late 13th century, if not well into the 14th. Most Crusaders of Nicky’s time would have likely fought with a one-handed “arming” sword, which looked something like this:

(This specific example is 12th century but it fits the bill for style of 11th century swords as well.)

One-handed swords were a necessity because sword battles were almost always fought with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other, unless you were cavalry in which case you held on to the damn horse with your other hand. Fighting with a shield as a common practice was discarded later on, towards the 15th century, as plate armor became more common.

Also... arming an entire army with swords actually was very expensive, but I’m trying not to overcomplicate so let’s assume that because Nicky had a higher rank than the average soldier (in comic canon), he would have been supplied with a standard arming sword of the period. If you’re looking to write a historically accurate fic, know that the ordinary civilian soldiers probably would not have all had their own standard-issue arming swords. Many would have had... polearms. And stuff. 

I wish I could give you any kind of estimate about the real time period Nicky’s canon sword comes from, but when I tell you that I dug deep into my reservoirs of sword knowledge, that I spent hours going through museum archives for any kind of extant sword that perfectly resembles what he uses... it just... it just doesn’t really exist. 

Here are some leads, in case you care to pursue them or spin a story out of them:

Most non-decorative two-handed swords from Western Europe date to the 14th through 16th century and generally have straight quillons that are much longer than Nicky’s, and the blades are longer and thinner, meant for piercing armor with direct thrusts. Here is an Italian version of the two-handed sword that exemplifies this.

This German 14th/15th century sword is two-handed, and has a very vaguely similar pommel shape, but the blade width and quillon are off.

European hand-and-a-half swords like this are dated to the 14th-16th century, and have mid-sized hilts, and they can also have slightly wider blades and T-type pommels. However, ones with curved quillons are considered highly unusual.

As you can see, the biggest obstacle to a perfect match seems to be the artistic liberties taken with the quillon on Nicky’s sword, which I totally respect, although it does make it difficult to create a convincing backstory for it. Also, I’ve been characterizing his pommel as T-type even though it’s not really that, because I can’t figure out a more accurate categorisation. Again, that exact pommel... doesn’t really exist in historical swords 

It is worth noting that in the movie, when the camera pans in the mine that Andy says they’ve kept their stuff in since the 1150′s, we catch a brief and badly-lit glimpse of THIS:

WHICH IS, IN FACT, A CRUCIFORM ARMING SWORD WITH A DISK POMMEL THAT HAS THE EDGES CHAMFERED OFF AND A STRAIGHT QUILLON. I.e., a historically accurate late 12th-13th century Crusader sword. Still not quite on beat for the First Crusade but much closer to the correct era. Did someone doing props on set sneak this in here for vague historical accuracy? Was this Nicky’s sword during like... the Third Crusade? Did it become unusable from age but he kept it stored for sentimental value? I will let the fic writers decide... 

Ok that’s it for now. If you want me to actually cite my sources for more of this info, I can. 

PS: I haven’t read the comics all the way through yet, and I am also just some nerd who likes history and does research in my free time. If I missed anything or if any of my information is inaccurate, please argue aggressively with me and send me anon hate over it (not kidding :)!)

[swordblog]

Reblogging this to my swordsmanship sideblog because this also kind of applies to reconstructive HEMA. We can read all four versions of the Flower of Battle and still never be able to perfectly replicate Fiore de'i Liberi's systems of wrestling, dagger fighting, sword fighting, or pollaxe fighting simply by virtue of the fact that none of us are Fiore de'i Liberi. None of us know firsthand what it is like to train in swordsmanship in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. For as verbose and specific as Gerard Thibault is, for as accurately and precisely as you might be able to perform the actions described in each play, the context of being an early 17th century rapier fencer is unknown to us. We might perfectly know the actions described by Fiore, Thibault, Fabris, or the anonymous writers of MS. 3227a or MS. I.33, but there are so many gaps that we have to figure out in each one. We often do our best to fill in with what you might call "frog DNA;" maybe you'd use épée fencing for Italian rapier, maybe you'd use escrima or kendo for longsword, or ju jitsu or judo for ringen and abrazare. Certainly, these things work well for making the reconstructed systems effective, but admittedly not always as much as we might hope they'd do to make them accurate to the ways in which they were practiced in-period. And that doesn't even get into how modern fencers likely train more frequently and consistently than the people who practiced these systems in-period, as well as how we possess the benefits of better nutrition, sports medicine, and coaching theory. And that isn't to say that we aren't trying very hard to improve the fidelity of what we practice in relation to the source material! We just will never be 100% accurate to Johannes Liechtenauer. But then again, neither was Joachim Meyer.

Thinking about this post. "The only way to make a cell is from another cell" is somewhat of a troubling fact to me. I mean, not for any practical reason, just because it underscores the precarity of *gestures broadly*.

It's like, some people talk about trying to de-extinct the mammoth. And people are trying to sequence the genome of the mammoth, I don't know if they've done it yet. But even if they do, one of the problems with the idea of de-extinction is... to grow a baby mammoth, you need another mammoth! Last time I heard people talking about this, I think they were talking about using an elephant as a surrogate mother. But imagine if elephants were extinct too.

The point is that information is often tied to the systems that transmit it; even if you know everything in the mammoth genome, once all the mammoths are gone there's nothing capable of reading and using that information. Like when you can't read the data on a perfectly good floppy disk because your computer doesn't have a floppy drive.

This is related to why language death troubles me so much. Even the most well-documented languages aren't actually that well understood; linguists have produced more pages of work on English syntax than maybe any other specific descriptive topic and yet still the only reliable way to get the answer to any moderately subtle syntactic question is elicit native speaker data. We know almost nothing, we can barely extrapolate at all! And every language is like this, a hugely complex system that we know basically nothing about, and if the chain of native speaker transmission is ever broken it's just gone.

"Language revival", I mean from a totally dead language, is kind of a myth. It's like the "came back different" trope. In Israel they revived Hebrew, but Modern Hebrew is really not the same thing as Biblical Hebrew at all. I mean in a stronger sense even than Modern English isn't Old English. All the subtleties of Biblical Hebrew that a native speaker would have had implicit competence with died without a trace. All they left is a grainy image, the texts. The first generation of Modern Hebrew speakers took the rough grammatical sketch preserved in these texts and imbued it with new subtleties, borrowed from Slavic and Germanic and the speakers' other native languages, or converged at by consensus among that first generation of children. There's nothing wrong with that, but it would be inaccurate to imagine Biblical Hebrew surviving in Modern Hebrew the way Old English survives in Modern English. For instance, you can discover a great deal that you didn't know about Old English by comparing Modern English dialects. There is nothing you can discover about Biblical Hebrew by comparing Modern Hebrew dialects in this way.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. I'm not like, judging Modern Hebrew. I'm just making a point.

Mammoths died recently, so we still have (some of?) their genome. Something that died longer ago, like dinosaurs, we have traces of them in the form of fossils but we could never hope to revive them, the information is just gone. Even if we're not aiming for revival, even if we just want to know stuff about dinosaurs, there's so much that we will never know and can never know.

We imagine information as the kind of thing which sits in an archive, because this is the context most of us encounter information in, I think. Libraries, hard drives. Well obviously hard drives don't last. And most ancient texts only survive because of a scribal tradition, continuous re-writing, not because of actual archival. So I think that imagining archives as the natural habitat of information is sort of wrong; the natural habit of information is in continuous transmission. Information is constantly moving. And it's like one of those sharks, if it ever stops moving it drowns. And if the lines of transmission are broken, the information is gone and can never be retrieved.

Very precarious.

[armthearmour]

Do we know what treatises would have been used for the Oakeshott type XVIIIe, AKA that giant Danish longsword? Who hasn't seen it on Albion and been both sad and also thankful they can't immediately order it? Given the grip length I'd lean towards it being a variation of a sort of northern Montante but with the ricasso being so prominently featured I almost think you could use it for some Talhoffer style half swording as well?

The Dane.

One of Albion’s largest swords, it certainly is imposing (and it can be yours, available here for only $1,980!) This is a massive sword, certainly montante sized at 58″ or 147 cm from tip to pommel. Ewart Oakeshott dates this type as mid 15th to early 16th century, a time in which we have a few good manuals.

Albion’s entry for this sword says that most examples are either Danish or Italian, and while we have no surviving Danish manuals from this period, we do have quite a few Italian sources. A notable few even cover the use of such large swords.

Philippo di Vadi for instance has his manual in which he covers the use of the longsword, spear, dagger, and poleaxe, with sections in armor.

He recommends the ideal length for a sword should be based on the individual, and seems to recommend relatively long swords, stating that the pommel should come up into the armpit. For me, this indicates a sword approximately 55″ or 140 cm in length, quite close to Albion’s Dane. Now, granted, I am relatively tall for the period, being 6′0″ or 1.83 m, but taller people than me did live then, and if Vadi’s system could be done with a 55″ sword, then it could certainly be done with the Dane.

Achille Marozzo is another notable Italian master who wrote in the period the type XVIIIe would have been used. His Opera Nova includes sections on numerous weapons combinations within the Bolognese school of swordsmanship, including the spadone.

Importantly, Marrozo’s Guardia Contra Arma Inastate shows us a possible use for this large ricasso.

Additionally, it isn’t out of the question to assume that some German martial arts would have been used in either Italy or Denmark, so looking into manuals form this period which cover the use of large swords may also be in order.

I hope this has been helpful! Cheers!

[friendlyfacestabbing]

this week on sword news

so, for the approximately three of you who read my nonsense, you might know that I do historical fencing, specifically longsword in the Italian style of Fiore (a dude from the 15th century with impressive facial hair, who wrote down a lot of what he had to say about effective stabbing and getting away with it).

^ #goals blah blah effective practice, blah blah proper equipment, blah blah maintain conditioning during plague blah bla- I NEED A SWORD

so I talk to the local contact, a few other people jump in on the order cos postage, and order a sword. (there are swordmakers all over, my school’s preferred armoury for longswords is in Hungary, so)

three months go by...

the good news: SWORDS ARRIVE!!!!! (yes!) the bad news: my sword (and a few others) were fucked up and made with the wrong steel for the blade (noooo!!!) the good news: they will fix the order and remake the swords at no additional cost! (yay!) the bad news: this is essentially a new order so the wait will be another three to four months (aww) the good news: actually cos they botched it they have bumped us to the top of the list and our swords are completed and ready to post right friggin now!!!! (YAAAAASSSS!!!!) now i just have to wait it to get here (again) :D anyway that was my friday, how’s your week been?

[heartoferebor]

[Video: op performing a number of historical sword drills at MCM Comic Con, dressed as Shay Cormac from Assassin’s Creed: Rogue in his Master Templar Coat] I do HEMA (historical martial arts) on the side, so it was fun doing some partial drills in cosplay! I can’t quite lift my arms up high enough in the coat to get some of the guards 100%, but the majority of these were borrowed from Vadi (15th century Italian longsword, here performed with a bastard sword), which is the longsword I’ve been learning :). Thank you to @asparklethatisblue for filming this!

(Costume & weapons entirely handmade by me - Follow me on Instagram!)

[theodorebennas]

Full plate armor holding a longsword. 15th-16th century. I think it’s Italian as well from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City

[kultofathena]

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🗡️The classic Italian Longsword from Balaur Arms returns with a twist🗡️

We asked swordmaker and martial artist LK Chen to not simply reproduce the original model, but to further optimize it to create a performance longsword. In addition to a host of material and construction improvements, LK Chen was able to achieve outstanding balance and performance characteristics with the use of substantial distal taper and faithfully executed hollow-ground blade. In the hand the sword is a natural extension of the arm and deft enough to be used with a single hand if necessary, but it truly comes into its own when wielded in two hands. A quick striker with a fast recovery, this is a sword that can keep pace with the speed of your mind in the duel.

In stock and available to order now

Thank you @thejade.eye for the video.

[nightbringer24]

Nightbringer24′s (personal) guidlines on using arms and armour when writing Medieval/Fantasy fiction. Part 1: Weapons.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: these are my own guidelines that I adhere to and what I personally like to see in fiction. They are by no means the be-all and end-all of writing fantasy fiction.

Fantasy is doing whatever the hell you want, and I by no means want to come across as saying that you can’t do this or that. But if I manage to inspire people in some form or another, I’m happy.

So let’s begin.

First off, we’re starting this whole thing with the fact that virtually every Western created fantasy story is basically Europe in some form or reflection of sorts. Now, while this can be seen as stagnating the fantasy genre, I do feel that this is a very narrow minded view of how diverse Medieval Europe actually was. One should not consider that every country was basically Medieval England/France, and fantasy should reflect this. Conversely, one should not consider that every fighter in the army of a king/prince/lord/duke/queen/princess/etc was a fully armoured knight on a tall horse armed with a lance, sword and shield (which is in itself an anachronistic combination in of itself, but I’ll touch on that later). Yes, there were many forms of arms and armour that were common throughout Europe, but that was simply because of one simple factor: they bloody worked. That’s it.

One should also consider one simple fact: no nation in Europe during the Middle Ages existed in a vacuum. Even if they didn’t fight against or with each other, they did certainly trade with each other, meaning that certain styles of armour from the European continent would certainly be found in places like Britain or Scandinavia, while even soldiers from the British Isles would be found fighting in armies as mercenaries in Germany or Italy (as did actually happen). The Middle Ages was the times when the biggest race was the arms race; as armour became stronger and more effective at covering a knight’s person, so too did the weapons have to become more effective at penetrating the armour in return.

Now, obviously, this little guideline does kind of run counter to the whole point of fantasy. While this obviously can be a good thing for the creator and the fans, for those of us who are inclined for a little bit of consistency in what they read, it can be very frustrating. Like, how is it that a civilization that can create full-plate armour and well-forged steel swords does not care one jot about armoured barding for their horses? No sense!

Anyway, let’s begin. For the purposes of generalization and ease, we’ll go with the assumption that all Medieval/Fantasy worlds are using the Late Middle Ages (14th century onwards) as their base.

We’ll start off with the basic thing: the weapons. Everyone needs weapons, but every weapon has a certain job that it can accomplish and some that it can’t. For example, a sword and an axe are just as good at killing an unarmoured or lightly armoured opponent, but the axe is also useful for other day-to-day activities while the sword is solely a fighting weapon.

So let’s start from the basic stuff and work our way up.

Daggers/Knives: this needs no improvement or great explanation on. Nearly everyone in the Medieval world had a dagger, from the lowliest serf to the greatest king. They were a tool of great utility and a great backup weapon as well. Knights were just as prone to carrying around daggers as were assassins. Although obviously certain limits are presented with these weapons: a peasant isn’t going to be carrying around a master-crafted dagger with intricate lion’s head adornments. If anything, it’ll be a simple cutting tool that was used for whittling wood or skinning an animal. However, one type of knife that would have seen much use in combat was the Rondel dagger.

This type of knife is the perfect example of what I mean about Europe in the Middle Ages being in an arms race. The Rondel dagger, while perfectly able to kill an unarmoured opponent with ease, one of its best uses was to kill an armoured knight, slipping through the joints under the armpit in to the rib-cage or through the visor of a helmet. English and Welsh longbowmen during the Hundred Years Wars were known to carry similar daggers and these would have also been the main backup weapon of the English and French knights and man-at-arms during the Wars.

Axes: An axe is an axe. There’s not a massive amount to elaborate on with the axe, but the point does need to be made that for the standard peasant levy, an axe would have been their go-to weapon. Everyone needs cut wood for a fire, so it’s not unreasonable to see peasants or lower-class fighters carrying around an axe. For civilizations that live in heavily wooded areas or groups that carry out raids for a living, like the vikings, the axe would have been their go-to weapon. Conversely, during the Mid to Late Middle Ages, the use of the axe by mounted knights did see a revival, since the force and power that could be carried through the swing of an axe could easily down an armoured opponent. Robert the Bruce of Scotland killed an English knight before the battle of Bannockburn by hitting him with such force that he broke the shaft of his axe (or so the story goes). There was another type of axe that was used almost exclusively by knights and man-at-arms, but I’ll touch on that later.

HOWEVER, I would like to make one thing clear: double-headed axes did not exist as combat weapons in large scales. They were large and very heavy, meaning that whoever used them was going to be a very tall and very strong individual. A good examples of an axe to give would be the simple two-handed axe, like the Sparth axe used by the Scots-Irish mercenaries known as the Gallowglass.

War hammers: War hammers are really another peasant weapon that when pressed in to combat prove to be a devastating weapon. While war hammers are traditionally single headed metal weapons with a spike on the rear, large two-handed variants called mauls existed, both of which saw use by knights and lower-ranking soldiers alike. In a quick pinch, stone mason hammers would easily be used to cave in plate armour.

Swords: Everyone knows a sword. Everyone knows what one looks like and how it is used (the accuracy of how will depend on how much you like watching fencing videos on YouTube). However, this does lead to a problem in that nearly every creator of fantasy decides to give every person in their world, regardless of station, a knightly longsword. You know the type I mean. You get the image of it in your head when you hear or read the word ‘knight’. That wouldn’t have happened. Even as smithing improved and plate armour became prevalent, the sword was still a status symbol of the nobility since it was an expensive weapon to produce and to equip and took a long time to master.

HOWEVER, this does not mean that a non-knight character couldn’t have a sword and there are some types of sword designs that could easily be used by a non-noble character.

First up, we have the falchion. 

This was single edged, heavy sword that could be used single handedly alongside a shield or by two hands. Now this was not an elegant weapon, as the design shows. This blade was purely designed for hacking and slashing your opponent to death. There is some dispute on whether this was a weapon that was used solely by the peasantry (since it would have been able to serve many peace-time jobs) or by knights as well. Personally, I consider this the go-to weapon for a mercenary character.

Next is the arming sword.

This sometimes called the Knightly Sword, since it was used right from the 10th century to the 15th century. This more the type of the sword that would be used in the sword and shield combination, since it was single-handed sword with a heavy-blade offset by a weighted pommel. However, with the creation of the two-handed longsword and the hand-and-a-half ‘bastard sword’ in the Late Middle ages, this sword became a backup weapon for knights and men-at-arms. These sort of swords evolved from Viking/Norman swords which had a small and more rectangular crossguard. This type of sword would work for characters that are in a city militia or are employed by a fairly wealthy noblemen as guards. Conversely, if it’s an older pattern sword, you could easily have it as a family heirloom. Or have a family of looters. Either one works.

Then there’s the great swords. Now, technically, there weren’t any swords that were historically called ‘great swords’, that’s a more modern pop culture invention. Claymores and zweihanders did exist as they were named, but they wouldn’t be called great swords either. But, they did have their uses. In combat, they wouldn’t have made great fencing swords; they were large, heavy and very unweildly. Their best use was in the mass attack, with armoured knights/man-at-arms charging in to massed enemy ranks of infantry and smashing in to them in a bloody melee. Another example is the more historical use of the zweihander which was their use to break enemy pike formations during the Italian Wars by the doppelsoldners of the Landsknecht mercenary regiments.

They could have been used to kill horses, but that would have probably been a rare occurrence and should probably only be used when the main protagonist is going up against a secondary or tertiary villain.

Also, one point needs to be made about the sword: in the right hands, every part of the sword was lethal. The pommel made a good bludgeon while effective use of the crossguard could disarm an opponent and also could be used to kill an opponent by gripping the blade and driving the crossguard in to the opponent’s face or head in the mordstreich or murder-stroke.

Spears: It’s a long staff of wood with a sharp metal point on the tip. However, that is not to say that a knight/man-at-arms wouldn’t be caught using a spear. It was a good offensive and defensive weapon, on horse or on foot. Since a spear could range from a simple wooden staff with a sharpened point to a staff with a metal tip, it could be used by a whole breadth of characters from peasant militia given weapons to professional men-at-arms.

Lance: Like the sword, this is also the main weapon that people envision when they hear or read the word ‘knight’. Basically, a length of wood at a midway length between the spear and the pike, it would be held underarm (or couched) by knights or other cavalry and would be used at the charge at full tilt. After the charge hit home, it would then be discarded and replaced with either a sword or a mace, since it was far too ungainly to be used in a close melee. Some lances, like those of the Polish Winged Hussars were constructed to be hollow, which meant they could be longer and could help in defeating formations in pike and spearmen.

Pikes: This is an even longer staff of wood with a sharp metal point on the tip. Usually between 3 and 7.5 metres at the extreme end (10 to 20 feet) in length, they were large and ungainly weapons primarily used as defensive weapons to guard against cavalry charges, although well trained fighters could use them as an offensive weapon. The main groups to use them in large numbers during the medieval period was the Lowland Scots and the Flemish, both of whom who lived in largely open geographical areas. Mercenaries are generally the best people to have pikes in a story.

Javelins: These were not used in great numbers past the Saxon conquest of England except in Ireland by light infantry known as kerns, but in a fantasy world, it wouldn’t be too obscure to have javelin armed troops in your armies, especially if they come from an area of low wealth.

Darts: This is kind of a midway point between an arrow and a javelin. It has a shorter reach than the javelin but is more accurate because of fletchings on the rear of the staff, making its flight more stable. Again, these would work more for soldiers from low wealthy areas.

Halberds: A mix of the spear and the axe, this was a brutal and brilliant all rounder weapon. Used predominantly by infantry by the later stages of the Middle Ages, it was an effective tool against cavalry, being able to spear horse, trip them with their blades or hook down their riders. Against infantry, it had all the uses of the spear and the axe in one tool that could easily be mastered.

Polearms: Now, this is a tricky one. The definition of a polearms as used by Wikipedia is: “...a close combat weapon in which the main fighting part of the weapon is fitted to the end of a long shaft, typically of wood, thereby extending the user's effective range. Spears, glaives, poleaxes, halberds, and naginata are all varieties of polearms.” However, since I’ve already covered spears and halberds above, I’ll go over the over ones now.

First is the glaive.

This is a single edged blade fitted on to a staff, primarily used as a cutting and thrusting weapon. There are historical artistic examples of glaives where the blade is longer than the staff it’s fitted to, so there’s a variety to create with them.

Next is the bill.

This the poor-mans halberd, but that doesn’t make it any less lethal. Used in significant numbers by the English forces from the Hundred Years War up to the reign of Elizabeth I, it was a wood cutters billhook attached to  a 5 to 6 foot long staff. As the centuries progressed, it took on more forms as elements were added to the billhook to turn it from a hacking weapon in a more halberd-esque weapon.

Then there’s the volgue.

Similar to the glaive and bill, it was a simple blade with a spike attached to a long piece of wood by binding it to the wood. The design and shape of the blade made it more of a hacking weapon than a cutting one, but it did its job well.

Then there’s the bardice.

This is basically an axe on steroids.

There are more examples, but if I added them, then this piece would run incredibly long.

All sorts of polearms are generally used by lower class soldiers, usually yeomen or levied soldiers.

Poleaxes: While this weapon would fall under the definition of ‘polearm’, I feel that the weapon deserves a mention of its own.

From the 14th century onwards, this weapon largely replaced the sword as the weapon of choice of armoured knights and men-at-arms because of one simple reason: it gave literally no fucks about armour. As shown on the example above, it was double headed, with one side having an axe-head while the other having a hammer head. Some examples replaced the axe or the hammer with a spike, but either example works. Mounted to a long piece of wood, usually 6 feet in length, it would be swung with two hands and could decimate unarmoured and lightly armoured infantry and would easily batter down armoured infantry and cavalry. During the Wars of the Roses, this was one the main weapons used by armoured infantry on both sides of the conflict, with many graves from the infamous Battle of Towton being shown to have many injuries inflicted by this weapon. If you don’t want to give a knight a sword, then I really suggest you give them a poleaxe.

Maces: We all know what a mace is. With either a metal or wooden shaft, a large metal head was attached to the head, transforming a simple club in to a brutal killing machine. Sometimes, the metal head would be given ridges, called flanges, which would help it in denting or breaking armour. A weapon generally favoured by knights/men-at-arms as a shock weapon, there were longer shafted variants that were exclusively used by mounted knights/men-at-arms. A spiked version of a mace is called a ‘morning star’, which is not a weapon that has the head attached to the shaft by a chain. That’s a flail which I will cover below.

Flails: Now, the name of this does get some people confused (I know it confused me when I was younger) between the flail and the morning star. In fact, the flail came in two variations: the peasant flail and the ball-and-chain flail.

First, the peasant flail.

Like the bill and the axe, this was originally a farming tool that was easily turned to warfare. Consisting of a long wooden shaft with a smaller wooden head attached by a short chain to the longer shaft. Some examples were studded while others were simply reinforced with metal bands. It was effective, as it was used with great effective by Hussite peasant forces against Catholic crusaders during the Hussite wars. It could easily bash aside a shield and unhorse a mounted opponent, but it lacked precision and was next to useless in a close-quarters melee. A good weapon to arm a peasant with.

Next we have the ball-and-chain flail.

This is another weapon that suffers from bit of the pop culture disease. From sources gathered, they weren’t a very common weapon but most likely came West from the Kingdoms of Rus. But even if they were used, they would require a HUGE amount of skill and strength to use correctly because it a swing is missed, the user runs the risk of injuring their hand or their own body when the ball comes back towards them from momentum.

Bows: Now we’ve covered the close-up weapons, let’s go on to the longrange weapons. Everyone knows the bow. It is, along with the sword, the quintessential weapon of the Medieval world and is also the quintessential weapon of the fantasy world too. But, like swords, they come in many flavours and styles and are often altered by pop culture. 

So let’s begin with the most basic and most well-known bow: the longbow.

Constructed from a bendy but strong type of wood, mainly yew heartwood, in a single piece (or self bow), it forms a recognizable D-shape when strung. Estimates of the draw weight vary but it’s generally accepted that the bow could achieve up to 100 lbs in draw weight, which is pretty hefty. However, this came with a trade off in that the user would have had to have begun training in the use of the bow from a very young age. Also, there is the myth about the amour penetration ability of the longbow. While it could have been able to penetrate softer armour (chainmail, padded jackets, leather, etc) with a bodkin point with relative ease, a fully armoured knight would have very much been able to shrug off a hit from a longbow loosed arrow with ease. So, if you’re writing a scene with longbows, bare that in mind (unless it’s a magic bow or magic arrows, then just go nuts).

Like the axe, the spear, the bill, the hammer and the flail, the longbow would have seen much use by peasants as, during the Middle Ages, the English monarchy made sure that all subjects were trained to use the longbow every Sunday, so it saw much use during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

Next are shortbows. Now these could either be smaller versions of the D-shaped longbow or the more intricate recurve bow. Again, like the longbow, these bows could easily have a draw weight in excess of 100 lbs, but also had the advantage of being able to be used on horseback by light cavalry. However, they did lack the same ability to punch through plate armour as the longbow did.

If you want bows that can penetrate plate armour though, then look no further than:

Crossbows: While the longbow had the range and rate of fire, the crossbow had the power, being able to penetrate plate armour. While it was easy to train people with in comparison to a longbow (a matter of weeks for the crossbow vs half a lifetime for the longbow), it wasn’t without its drawbacks. In inclement weather, the longbow could easily be destrung and kept dry while destringing  the crossbow was a long and laborious task, meaning that many times the archers didn’t bother, which would lead to disastrous consequences (like at the battle of Crecy). There was also the fact that in the space of a minute, a well-trained longbowmen could easily loose off 10 to 12 arrows while a well-trained crossbowmen could at best manage half that. Again, like with the shortbow, smaller crossbows could be used on horseback but required massive amounts of skill to get it right when fighting on the move.

There is also another variant of the crossbow that was used in Europe, the arbalest.

Instead of the older style of crossbow which required the used to manually pull back the string to the trigger latch, which saw massive amounts of energy needed, the arbalest was fitted with a windlass which made drawing the string back easier. A well trained crossbowman, with a good vantage point, plenty of time and plenty of bolts, could wreak havoc on an enemy force.

Now, I’ve covered all the basic weapons, but I’m going to touch on one more aspect of medieval weaponry that is largely ignored and is something that I feel can really set apart your fantasy world from others if you decide to include it.

Black powder.

Now gunpowder weapons were used by European armies during the Medieval ages and, while they were very basic, they still caused massive amounts of damage to the enemy. Your gunpowder weapons came in three forms: bombards, handgonnes and ribaulds.

A bombard was your basic large bore cannon.

A long iron tube, it was mainly used in sieges where it would be placed in to a presighted position, then fired large stone balls at enemy castles and walls. It’s size made it slow to load and once it was set it was probably never going to move again for the duration of the battle. A perfect target for light infantry and cavalry.

Next is the handgonne.

Similar in design to a bombard (an iron tube with a vent hole for ignition), this one was smaller, being able to be carried by a man. Combine with a large stick as a stock for the back to make it easier to use, sometimes it was used by one or two men. Like the bombard, it would have been cumbersome to load and fire, especially in a pitched battle, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been devastating to use.

And lastly, we have a very strange but no less destructive weapon, the ribauld, or as it was sometimes called, the organ gun.

As the name suggests, it had several barrels arrayed in a single line (although some sources say they were spread like a duck’s foot) like an organ which would all be fired simultaneously in a devastating burst of smoke, fire and lead. Compared to the bombard, they were designed to be more maneuverable but would still have been cumbersome to use, so would most likely have seen use when the army using them was in an entrenched or prepared position.  Like the handgonnes and bombards, the ribaulds would only be crewed by men that the commander of the army knew could use them.

And there we have it. A list of the various weapons and arms that you could use to arm members of the populace of a Medieval/Fantasy world and have them kill other members of the populace with. Again, I’m not saying that anyone who reads this must adhere to it, but it’s just a guideline of what someone who enjoys fantasy and history would like to see.

[sunderlorn]

Semi-Weekly Swordstuff Update

An evening and a morning late, I suppose, but better late than never. This week was meant to be longsword, but something happened with Matt and the club weapons, so another scholar led the class, and the beginner section ended up being on the start of the hand-to-handy grapply (abrazare) bit of Fiore’s treatise.

Pretty interesting, generally, for any number of reasons. Namely, that the existence of and attempts to reconstruct like...14th/15th century Italian hand-to-hand martial arts, as opposed to East Asian ones, is an interesting contrast to make. Like, the fact that they exist at all is a fact worth noting. But for those vaguely familiar with the rest of Fiore’s system, it’s also interesting to see how it sort of operates on the same systems. He basically implements and reworks four of the guards that appear in his two-handed and one-handed sword systems for unarmed fighting. Posta longa, denta di cinghiale, porta di ferro, and posta frontale. And a lot of the plays are sort of translations of stuff I recognised from the later sections in the treatise: his gioco stretto pommel strike plays, for instance. That gives the whole treatise a nice sense of continuity and holism, to my mind, and means that knowledge of different sections are applicable across weapons systems too, if you’re clever with them.

Also, I guess the fact that a lot of these are techniques that presume your opponent is trying to stab you with a dagger, and often has surprised you, make them pretty interesting too in the context of like...medieval Italian street brawls and suchlike. And the content of the section, if you read it, clearly has these sorts of life-or-death no-holds-barred brawl situations in mind, given how fucking dirty most of the techniques are --- it’s all joint-locks and -breaks, eye gouging, nose-smashing, and “BY THIS PLAY I WILL DESTROY YOUR TESTICLES, SUCH THAT NO STRENGTH WILL REMAIN IN YOUR HEART”.

(For more cute little bits of nastiness from this bit of Fiore’s treatise, at least according to my interpretation, see here.)

Anyway, we went through like the first four plays, which are basically ways to fuck someone up who tries to grip you by the shoulder or throat in one hand, and wail on you with a knife or just their other fist. Mostly it involves stopping the momentum of their potentially-knifey hand, getting your body the fuck away from it, while breaking, locking, or straight-up dislocating their left elbow and forcing them to the ground. That, and various ways to respond to their likely responses.

But this throws up something else interesting, for me. Sword techniques are sort of distanced from their likely effect, when you practice them. Which is probably for the best because, god, do you really wanna be thinking about what a sharp longsword wielded proficiently is gonna do to someone? (I mean, kinda, yeah, in the abstract, but I’m in no hurry at all to literally find out.) It’s hard to imagine, when you’re just drilling with a partner, what the effects of these plays were meant to be. But with unarmed stuff, grappling, locks, etc., even just slowly and gently practicing them gives you a sense of their likely effects. When you practice, you push to just the beginning of possible discomfort for your partner, and when you’re on the receiving end, that discomfort is a warning sign --- the mechanics of your body are getting turned against themselves, and you sort of feel that if your partner pushed a little further, applied a little more force or torque, that they could do real damage. Even applying very little force, as the one executing the grapples and stuff, it’s weirdly easy to get your opponent very thoroughly off-balance, or immobilised, or on the ground.

Anyway, after that, the advanced class was longsword. Footwork exercises, and some full-speed, full-intent crosses and thrusting ripostes. Then sparring, but nothing really so interesting or new as the unarmed stuff...which honestly I’m proud of myself for managing to go through without breaking or dislocating anything!

[kultofathena]

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🗡️ The blade is forged from GB 60Si2MnA high carbon alloy spring steel and is well tempered to a 54-55 HRc hardness. 🗡️This version of the Italian Longsword has a sharp edge as factory standard from the manufacturer for a smooth edge that removes the efficiency loss from a secondary bevel for optimal cutting. 🗡️The hollow ground blade cross section not only reduces weight, but also ensures that there is minimum drag as the blade bites into and passes through its target. 🗡️The blade has a tapered profile and is intended for efficient cut-and-thrust use – it retains the necessary rigidity for thrusting and will handle half-sword technique well for defeating an armored harness. 🗡️ LK Chen was able to optimize the tip shape and blade rigidity to bring out the full potential of this longsword for thrusting as a fine match to its already excellent cutting ability.

In stock and available to order today

[kultofathena]

Balaur Arms – 15th Century Italian Longsword

🗡️ LK Chen was able to achieve outstanding balance and performance characteristics with the use of substantial distal taper and faithfully executed hollow-ground blade. 🗡️In the hand the sword is a natural extension of the arm and deft enough to be used with a single hand if necessary, but it truly comes into its own when wielded in two hands. A quick striker with a fast recovery, this is a sword that can keep pace with the speed of your mind in the duel. 🗡️The sword itself takes its inspiration from late 14th and mid 15th century century longswords, namely an unnamed longsword with an acutely tapered blade in the collection of the Royal Armouries, the longsword attributed to Edward the Black Prince and also inspiration for the hilt in the form of the famed Brescia Spadona in the Musueo Civico in Brescia, Italy.

In stock and available to order today

[kultofathena]

✨Restock ✨

Be Quick! they won’t be here long!

Balaur Arms - Knight Templar Arming Sword

Balaur Arms - 15th Century Italian Longsword

[kultofathena]

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@thejade.eye with our Balaur Arms Italian Longsword.

“The gravity and when they finally meet each other”