Damascus steel I've heard about over the years was supposedly named in one of the crusades (Damascus being in the middle east, and the crusades being in the mid

Damascus steel I've heard about over the years was supposedly named in one of the crusades (Damascus being in the middle east, and the crusades being in the middle east) and european knights encountering swords of vastly superior sharpness, strength, durability, and flexibility. This was noteworthy because ideal swords are strong and sharp, but flex so they don't shatter/become brittle (which is bad in combat...), with strength and flexibility being opposing properties when forging swords. Too The Damascus blades somehow exceeded european crusade era steels in all three areas, which was thought impossible. And, superficially at a minimum, these swords had a pattern. This simple etymology isn't mentioned, nor is the crusades, the sharpness/flexibility/strength/superiority, which seems strange. I suppose you'd need a sampling of the crusades era weaponry and its properties, and try to find a real damascus blade with similar superior properties to verify the military advantage, and then figure out if it is just better. I've seen a lot of reddit/HN postings and I don't know if the superior swords were actually demonstrated. I recall one post speculating carbon nanotubes forming back when "carbon nanotubes" was a very clickworthy headline term. Can you take relics and heirloom swords and destroy them for testing? Probably not. Thus, the mystery. Are the "damascus swords" we do have actually the militarily superior ones? Were they just slightly better but more uniformly performant, while knight swords were a bit more variant? Who knows. I don't think this article really cleared up much nor lived up to the central claim "we can do that, it's not a lost art".