14 ms·

Swords have little use on a medieval battlefield anyway. You use different weapons and tactics. Just curious - could you explain this in a bit more detail? It'

Swords have little use on a medieval battlefield anyway. You use different weapons and tactics. Just curious - could you explain this in a bit more detail? It's surprising.

termain 12y ago
It's hard to get a sword into play against massed pikemen. And you want massed pikemen against the heavy cavalry of the period. Also swords expensive compared to spears.
bane 12y ago
just echoing what termain said. Going back to at least the Greek Phalanx and up to even quite a while after the introduction of gunpowder, massed warfare typically involved long weapons like spears or pikes. A reasonably good depiction is the Phalanx shown in the movie "300". The history of warfare is generally about increasing the standoff distance between two militaries. The side with longer spears generally did better, then the side with the better archers. Even after gunpowder was introduced, the reload time was so long that after getting a shot off, armies would switch to pikes. The "wall of men in formation" you see in the Napoleonic wars and the American Revolutionary and Civil wars was sort of the last use of that kind of traditional formation and movement. The widespread use of heavy artillery put an end to it much like the airplane put an end to trench warfare. http://bcw-project.org/military/tactics http://bcw-project.org/military/tactics
- sswaner 12y ago
  Armor (tanks) and other forms of mechanized infantry contributed more to the end of trench warfare than airplanes.
  - kbenson 12y ago
    Yeah, listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History[1] series, which is currently covering WWI, this is very apparent. Airplanes seem to have been used for reconnaissance more than anything. That makes sense when the artillery brought to bear was so concentrated is literally reduced forests to fields of churned up earth with splinters. Edit: Added link I forgot. 1: http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-blueprint-for-armageddon-i/ http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepri...
Sander_Marechal 12y ago
Sure. The problem is that swords don't have much effect on an armoured opponent. There are three types of attacks you can do with a sword: slashing, stabbing and cutting. Against a gambeson (jacked made of 20+ layes of linen stitched together) stabbing works, slashing is hard and cutting mostly doesn't work. Now add a layer of maille over the gambeson. Cutting doesn't work at all anymore, slashing probably only bruises you or breaks some bones and stabbing only works with narrow and sharp-tipped swords. Replace the maille with steel plates and you're pretty much invulnerable to swords, except at the joints, eyeslits, etc). So, sending out a group armed with swords on the battlefield isn't going to do much. You want warhammers with backspikes that can pierce steel plate and crush bone, halberds that can hit so hard it crushes anything underneath armour, long pikes to keep the enemy at a distance, bows to pierce maille. The best weapon on the battlefield is actually mass. Get a group large enough close together and trample your opponents. That's how most battles were won. In viking and early medieval times you would use large shields and short spears, create a shield wall and run over your opponent. Later on heavy cavalry appeared who could easily run over them. Cavalry dominated until the English started using the longbow en masse to kill the mounts of the cavalry. Swiss pikemen started using 6+ meter long pikes in tight bock formations. These pikes were so long that cavalry could be stopped dead before they reached the pikemen in a charge. It's like a wooden cumple zone. That pretty much spelled the end of heavy cavalry. Then soldiers started using halberds to get in between the pikes and crush pike blocks. Swords were often carried on the battlefield but usually as a backup weapon, not as the primary weapon. Their cross shape granted them a lot of symbolic meaning in those religious times, but there are much better weapons available if you want to win large battles.
- gadders 12y ago
  >Swiss pikemen started using 6+ meter long pikes in tight bock formations. This sounds a bit like a Greek Hoplite Phalanx.
  - aidenn0 12y ago
    The weakness of the phalanx is that you can be outflanked; it's really hard to turn a long pike to address an opponent not in front of you. I would imagine that having cavalry to protect your flanks would make it a lot more effective.
Tuna-Fish 12y ago
Swords are sidearms, designed for self-defense, duels, and as last resort. They were very rarely used as main battlefield weapons between the fall of Rome and the widespread use of firearms. In general, people on foot in this period fought with some kind of polearms, from spears to dane axes to bardiches to pollaxes to pikes. Same goes for Japan, btw -- the fetishization of katanas happened after samurais stopped being soldiers and became bureaucrats. On the actual battlefield a samurai was most likely to hold a long spear or a bow.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  And in Roman formations they were used in much the same way later and earlier combatants used spears: tightly locked ranks of shields, with the sword as a thrusting weapon.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  > On the actual battlefield a samurai was most likely to hold a long spear or a bow. As seen in Seven Samurai
elbows 12y ago
I would say, rather, that the sword was used as a sidearm rather than a primary weapon. Most soldiers would have been armed with a spear, lance, or other polearm -- weapons with greater reach and ability to penetrate armor. But many of those soldiers would also have carried a sword as a backup weapon and for use at closer range.
mcv 12y ago
He puts it a bit too general, but against full plate armour, swords are nearly useless. In the late Middle Ages, when plate armour became increasingly common, people started using weapons with better armour-piercing capabilities, like maces, warhammers and various polearms. Swords are great against lightly armoured and unarmoured targets, like peasants, archers and civilians. Swords remained in use as a side arm and civilian weapon, and a popular duelling weapon, which may also be why so many medieval manuscripts are about one-on-one fights. Carrying a polearm with you everywhere you go is a lot more cumbersome than having a sword hanging on your belt. But swords were absolutely used on the battlefield. Romans and vikings used them a lot. Knights had them of course, and even they became increasingly less useful against other knights, they often didn't really want to kill each other anyway. Pikemen generally had a short sword as backup weapon (the Katzbalger), and there's of course the massive two-handed swords used by Landsknechts to break up pike formations (supposedly; nobody knows for sure). But again knights in plate armour, you'd better get something that can knock holes in it. If you want to kill him, that it. You might compare the sword to a pistol. You don't usually send a mass of soldiers into battle with just a pistol; you give them assault rifles (or polearms). But officers and civilians tend to carry a pistol, and maybe some soldiers have one for backup.
- voidlogic 12y ago
  >He puts it a bit too general, but against full plate armor, swords are nearly useless. A sword may not be an ideal weapon against an armored opponent, but half-swording with one is still very effective... Also its important to note, the sword pedagogically-speaking is the root weapon of HEMA systems. So the fact these folks train with a sword as their primary weapon makes sense. Manuscripts support historical training following the same pattern. I teach you how to use a sword, then I teach you how to use a pole-axe... I elaborate more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948675 >You might compare the sword to a pistol. This is a good point, I think people often overlook how knights and samurai on foot share the same battlefield weapon configuration: <primary weapon> + <longsword/Katana> + <dagger/Tantō>
  - mcv 12y ago
voidlogic 12y ago
I want to point out that the system that HEMA teaches (all though done usually by teaching longsword first) is a multi-weapon + unarmed system. A given technique that you can do with a longsword can also be done with a pole-axe. A pole-axe us better suited for armored combat (Harnischfechten) and a sword is better suited for unarmored combat (Blossfechten). Although its worth pointing out, there are Harnischfechten techniques for longsword commonly referred to as half-swording (and you almost NEVER see these in movies). Btw, the unarmed component is called Ringen. P.S. There are two similar schools for HEMA, the German and Italian school, my terms used above are the German terms. Most of the difference is either style, terminology or quite subtle.
- GnarlinBrando 12y ago
  There are also a lot of other non-HEMA historical european martial arts groups and less historical EuroMA. For instance you can find stick fighting most palces, Jogo Do Pau is Portuguese stick/staff fighting, Savate is French kickboxing usually with cane and maybe some sailor stuff, Zipota is similar, but from Basque Spain. Lots of herding cultures kept this stuff alive and whether it is MMA or something else they seem to be getting more attention.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
Still a sword, but not the same kind of sword most people think of: For much of their history, the Roman Legions used a kind of short, broad-bladed sword called the gladius. There were various types across the centuries, but generally they were quite a bit shorter than the swords we see in the movies, sometimes as short as 18 inches from guard to point. This was not a great one-on-one weapon; all other things being equal, a warrior with a traditional long-bladed sword would usually beat a shorter one. But the Legions didn't fight one-on-one. They fought shoulder-to-shoulder, leading with big rectangular shields, and thrusting around the side, top, or bottom with the gladius. Quite a few of their of their enemies came from traditions that emphasized personal glory and used big, long swords that needed room to swing. These men had to space themselves out further to avoid hitting their fellows, and so each one would find himself facing two Legionnaires shoulder-to-shoulder. A bigger sword doesn't help much against odds like that. (I am not an expert and I have probably got some details wrong; feel free to correct me.)

Swords have little use on a medieval battlefield anyway. You use different weapons and tactics. Just curious - could you explain this in a bit more detail? It's surprising.

termain 12y ago

It's hard to get a sword into play against massed pikemen. And you want massed pikemen against the heavy cavalry of the period. Also swords expensive compared to spears.

bane 12y ago

just echoing what termain said. Going back to at least the Greek Phalanx and up to even quite a while after the introduction of gunpowder, massed warfare typically involved long weapons like spears or pikes. A reasonably good depiction is the Phalanx shown in the movie "300". The history of warfare is generally about increasing the standoff distance between two militaries. The side with longer spears generally did better, then the side with the better archers. Even after gunpowder was introduced, the reload time was so long that after getting a shot off, armies would switch to pikes. The "wall of men in formation" you see in the Napoleonic wars and the American Revolutionary and Civil wars was sort of the last use of that kind of traditional formation and movement. The widespread use of heavy artillery put an end to it much like the airplane put an end to trench warfare. http://bcw-project.org/military/tactics http://bcw-project.org/military/tactics

sswaner 12y ago
Armor (tanks) and other forms of mechanized infantry contributed more to the end of trench warfare than airplanes.
- kbenson 12y ago
  Yeah, listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History[1] series, which is currently covering WWI, this is very apparent. Airplanes seem to have been used for reconnaissance more than anything. That makes sense when the artillery brought to bear was so concentrated is literally reduced forests to fields of churned up earth with splinters. Edit: Added link I forgot. 1: http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-blueprint-for-armageddon-i/ http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepri...

Sander_Marechal 12y ago

Sure. The problem is that swords don't have much effect on an armoured opponent. There are three types of attacks you can do with a sword: slashing, stabbing and cutting. Against a gambeson (jacked made of 20+ layes of linen stitched together) stabbing works, slashing is hard and cutting mostly doesn't work. Now add a layer of maille over the gambeson. Cutting doesn't work at all anymore, slashing probably only bruises you or breaks some bones and stabbing only works with narrow and sharp-tipped swords. Replace the maille with steel plates and you're pretty much invulnerable to swords, except at the joints, eyeslits, etc). So, sending out a group armed with swords on the battlefield isn't going to do much. You want warhammers with backspikes that can pierce steel plate and crush bone, halberds that can hit so hard it crushes anything underneath armour, long pikes to keep the enemy at a distance, bows to pierce maille. The best weapon on the battlefield is actually mass. Get a group large enough close together and trample your opponents. That's how most battles were won. In viking and early medieval times you would use large shields and short spears, create a shield wall and run over your opponent. Later on heavy cavalry appeared who could easily run over them. Cavalry dominated until the English started using the longbow en masse to kill the mounts of the cavalry. Swiss pikemen started using 6+ meter long pikes in tight bock formations. These pikes were so long that cavalry could be stopped dead before they reached the pikemen in a charge. It's like a wooden cumple zone. That pretty much spelled the end of heavy cavalry. Then soldiers started using halberds to get in between the pikes and crush pike blocks. Swords were often carried on the battlefield but usually as a backup weapon, not as the primary weapon. Their cross shape granted them a lot of symbolic meaning in those religious times, but there are much better weapons available if you want to win large battles.

gadders 12y ago
>Swiss pikemen started using 6+ meter long pikes in tight bock formations. This sounds a bit like a Greek Hoplite Phalanx.
- aidenn0 12y ago
  The weakness of the phalanx is that you can be outflanked; it's really hard to turn a long pike to address an opponent not in front of you. I would imagine that having cavalry to protect your flanks would make it a lot more effective.

Tuna-Fish 12y ago

Swords are sidearms, designed for self-defense, duels, and as last resort. They were very rarely used as main battlefield weapons between the fall of Rome and the widespread use of firearms. In general, people on foot in this period fought with some kind of polearms, from spears to dane axes to bardiches to pollaxes to pikes. Same goes for Japan, btw -- the fetishization of katanas happened after samurais stopped being soldiers and became bureaucrats. On the actual battlefield a samurai was most likely to hold a long spear or a bow.

rodgerd 12y ago
And in Roman formations they were used in much the same way later and earlier combatants used spears: tightly locked ranks of shields, with the sword as a thrusting weapon.
JetSpiegel 12y ago
> On the actual battlefield a samurai was most likely to hold a long spear or a bow. As seen in Seven Samurai

elbows 12y ago

I would say, rather, that the sword was used as a sidearm rather than a primary weapon. Most soldiers would have been armed with a spear, lance, or other polearm -- weapons with greater reach and ability to penetrate armor. But many of those soldiers would also have carried a sword as a backup weapon and for use at closer range.

mcv 12y ago

He puts it a bit too general, but against full plate armour, swords are nearly useless. In the late Middle Ages, when plate armour became increasingly common, people started using weapons with better armour-piercing capabilities, like maces, warhammers and various polearms. Swords are great against lightly armoured and unarmoured targets, like peasants, archers and civilians. Swords remained in use as a side arm and civilian weapon, and a popular duelling weapon, which may also be why so many medieval manuscripts are about one-on-one fights. Carrying a polearm with you everywhere you go is a lot more cumbersome than having a sword hanging on your belt. But swords were absolutely used on the battlefield. Romans and vikings used them a lot. Knights had them of course, and even they became increasingly less useful against other knights, they often didn't really want to kill each other anyway. Pikemen generally had a short sword as backup weapon (the Katzbalger), and there's of course the massive two-handed swords used by Landsknechts to break up pike formations (supposedly; nobody knows for sure). But again knights in plate armour, you'd better get something that can knock holes in it. If you want to kill him, that it. You might compare the sword to a pistol. You don't usually send a mass of soldiers into battle with just a pistol; you give them assault rifles (or polearms). But officers and civilians tend to carry a pistol, and maybe some soldiers have one for backup.

voidlogic 12y ago
>He puts it a bit too general, but against full plate armor, swords are nearly useless. A sword may not be an ideal weapon against an armored opponent, but half-swording with one is still very effective... Also its important to note, the sword pedagogically-speaking is the root weapon of HEMA systems. So the fact these folks train with a sword as their primary weapon makes sense. Manuscripts support historical training following the same pattern. I teach you how to use a sword, then I teach you how to use a pole-axe... I elaborate more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948675 >You might compare the sword to a pistol. This is a good point, I think people often overlook how knights and samurai on foot share the same battlefield weapon configuration: <primary weapon> + <longsword/Katana> + <dagger/Tantō>
- mcv 12y ago

voidlogic 12y ago

I want to point out that the system that HEMA teaches (all though done usually by teaching longsword first) is a multi-weapon + unarmed system. A given technique that you can do with a longsword can also be done with a pole-axe. A pole-axe us better suited for armored combat (Harnischfechten) and a sword is better suited for unarmored combat (Blossfechten). Although its worth pointing out, there are Harnischfechten techniques for longsword commonly referred to as half-swording (and you almost NEVER see these in movies). Btw, the unarmed component is called Ringen. P.S. There are two similar schools for HEMA, the German and Italian school, my terms used above are the German terms. Most of the difference is either style, terminology or quite subtle.

GnarlinBrando 12y ago
There are also a lot of other non-HEMA historical european martial arts groups and less historical EuroMA. For instance you can find stick fighting most palces, Jogo Do Pau is Portuguese stick/staff fighting, Savate is French kickboxing usually with cane and maybe some sailor stuff, Zipota is similar, but from Basque Spain. Lots of herding cultures kept this stuff alive and whether it is MMA or something else they seem to be getting more attention.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

Still a sword, but not the same kind of sword most people think of: For much of their history, the Roman Legions used a kind of short, broad-bladed sword called the gladius. There were various types across the centuries, but generally they were quite a bit shorter than the swords we see in the movies, sometimes as short as 18 inches from guard to point. This was not a great one-on-one weapon; all other things being equal, a warrior with a traditional long-bladed sword would usually beat a shorter one. But the Legions didn't fight one-on-one. They fought shoulder-to-shoulder, leading with big rectangular shields, and thrusting around the side, top, or bottom with the gladius. Quite a few of their of their enemies came from traditions that emphasized personal glory and used big, long swords that needed room to swing. These men had to space themselves out further to avoid hitting their fellows, and so each one would find himself facing two Legionnaires shoulder-to-shoulder. A bigger sword doesn't help much against odds like that. (I am not an expert and I have probably got some details wrong; feel free to correct me.)