Official Derailed thread... Wait, what?

So this exists:


What have I been doing with my life?

 

I always thought the katana to have seen actual warfare, where as the other more ceremonial. Regardless, neither would fare well against a fully armored solider; that's what maces and clubs are for.

 

There was a great article about medieval European weapons on Quora.

https://www.quora.com/How-useful-wa...eat-sword-in-war/answer/Eric-Lowe-6?srid=zfqv

I'll copy paste it here:

How useful was a dismounted knight with Maximilian plate armor and two handed great sword in war?

Eric Lowe, Historical fencing instructor and military history student.
4.1k Views · Upvoted by Jon Davis, Military and Cultural Historian, Veteran of US Military,Matthew Lawrence, Fighting with swords for 10 years and have been doing Filipino martial arts., and Joe Buettner


Thanks for the A2A. I don’t think we can answer this question without clearing up some misconceptions, as the other answers have intimated. Pictures incoming, because there can be a lot of confusion about the words used to describe Renaissance armored fighting men and the weapons they use. For the arms and armor geeks out there, fair warning: these pictures are going to contain some minor inaccuracies, because I’m trying to go for full-color pictures that I hope will best correspond with the images people have in their minds, and as a result there are going to be some pictures of reproduction gear in this answer.

Here’s a suit of Gothic-style armor such as the great armor centers of the Holy Roman Empire were turning out during the Renaissance (sometimes referred to as “Maximilian,” after the Holy Roman Emperor):


Here’s a guy wearing Gothic armor, equipped with a two-handed great sword.


This gentleman is not a knight. You can tell because … well, because he’s got a two-handed greatsword.

Here’s a guy wearing Gothic armor, equipped with a poleaxe:


This gentleman quite possibly is a knight (although what it means to be a “knight” in the Holy Roman Empire is not necessarily what you think it means, which is a topic for another thread). How can you tell? Because he’s got a poleaxe (though that’s not a guaranteed indicator; see below).

This is the first major misconception we need to clear up. Maximilian/Gothic plate armor doesn’t arrive on the scene until the Renaissance, so you’ve got to get out of your head any notion that plate armor is for the wealthy elite only. Fully a thousand years have elapsed since the beginning of the Middle Ages, and Europe has seen some very significant advances in technology and economy during that time. Plate armor is not cheap, even in the Renaissance, but it also isn’t something reserved only for the elite few. Thus, the fact that someone is in armor does not mean he’s a knight. It means he’s rich enough - or cares enough - to buy good armor. If you really cared - like, say, you’re a professional soldier - you might not even be that rich (mercenaries are likely to put “good armor” pretty darn high up their list of spending priorities).

So let’s talk about the weapons. Here we need to clear up another bit of terminology. This is a guy wearing Gothic armor and wielding a sword in two hands:


But it is not a guy wielding a two-handed sword.[1] This is a sword designed to be used in two hands, but it is not a “two-handed sword:”

 

This is also a sword designed to be used in two hands, and it is a “two-handed sword:”


There are significant differences between these two types of objects. The first type (what modern fencers call a “longsword” - also not a period term) is a sidearm; i.e., a backup weapon that you can wear. It’s quite a large sidearm, with a blade of around 35–40″ (at the extreme), but it’s still a sidearm. It came into fashion during the high Middle Ages, achieved its very pointy profile around the late Middle Ages, and stuck around into the Renaissance. In modern terms, it’s something like a very large handgun.


Another rather old, but still highly effective, sidearm.

The second weapon - what modern fencers call a zweihander, montante, spadone, greatsword, or just two-handed sword - is a primary weapon. It’s got a blade that’s about as long (or longer) than the entire longsword all by itself, and it may weigh literally twice as much. It is far too big to wear; it’s got to be carried, like a spear. It came into fashion during the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. In modern terms (if you’ll permit me to stretch the hand-weapons-to-firearms analogy, which does get a bit dicey since we’re already well into the age of firearms), it’s not a handgun, but a shotgun. So anybody who is fighting like this:


is well and truly desperate. This guy did not go to war intending to fight like this. This is a guy who has somehow lost his primary weapon and had to pull out his sidearm, and if his opponent is armored, he’d better pray that the opponent has also lost his primary weapon.

Speaking of fighting armored opponents with sidearms.

Now let’s move on to usage.

No sword is great at defeating armor. Oh, there are absolutely ways you can kill a guy in armor using a longsword, and having six pounds of zweihander crash into you is not a healthy experience whether you have armor or not. But there’s a difference between being able to use a weapon to kill an armored an opponent and having a weapon that is good at killing an armored opponent, and no sword is really goodagainst armor.

What swords are good against are relatively soft targets. A two-handed sword is murder in a street fight, and it was also found that they were quite effective against hedges of long polearms. For this reason, they were used in Renaissance warfare by certain kinds of troops as a specialist sort of anti-pike weapon, and found to be quite effective in that role. A company of armored troops that knew how to use two-handed swords on the battlefield, in conjunction with other polearms, could find itself in high demand as mercenaries.[2]


Highly effective armored mercenaries are always a hit with the ladies. Dress accordingly, gentlemen.

Still, the main work of actually killing people in armor was left to other troops with other weapons (cf. the guy on the far right in the image above, with the halberd). And for this reason, the sword was never one of a knight’s main weapons. A knight’s mainweapons were always the spear, the axe, and the dagger - weapons that pose a high threat to other guys in armor. This was true in the Hundred Years’ War, and it was still true in the Renaissance.


Spear on foot vs. horse

What’s that? The axe, a quintessential knightly weapon? Oh yes. The spear was always a popular weapon for knights fighting on foot. But for the knight who really wanted to mix it up up close, the two-handed axe was the weapon of choice.[3]


Which brings us back to this gentleman, who is all kitted out for hacking off unarmored limbs, spearing through mail, and smashing armored foes into bloody messes:


This sort of combination choppy-pointy-bashy weapon - what modern people call a poleaxe - was the quintessential knightly foot combat weapon for centuries, which is why I say this guy is probably a knight. Armored non-knightly foot soldiers tended to have somewhat more specialized weapons (think back to our landsknecht mercenary image above, where one guy has a two-handed sword and one guy has a halberd; others in their unit would probably have had pikes), and achieve the choppy-pointy-bashy combination effect by working together with the other guys in their unit.

So let’s bring it back to the original question.

How effective is the armored guy with the two-handed sword, in warfare?

Well, by himself, not very. In a street fight (and yes, people brought those giant two-handed swords to street fights) or a duel (yes, people dueled with them too) he would have been an unholy terror all by his lonesome. On the battlefield, he would be able to clear a path into enemy infantry, but find himself relatively unequipped to actuallykill them.[4] Of course, he wouldn’t be alone in warfare, and as part of a combined-arms unit, he’d be very effective and quite possibly in high demand internationally.

How effective is the armored guy with the poleaxe, in warfare?

By himself, somewhat more effective than the guy with the two-handed sword. He’s got a more versatile weapon system that can deal with more threats, and his armor is just as good. On the other hand, if you put a hundred guys just like him together in a unit, their weapons wouldn’t synergize particularly. They’d still be quite formidable, but they wouldn’t be as formidable as they could be if they had a mix of more specialized weaponry.

[1] As that term is used today. Modern sword terminology bears only a loose resemblance to medieval and Renaissance sword terminology.

[2] In terms of military doctrine, two-handed swords were basically considered a polearm. You wouldn’t look at your mercenary company and say, “Okay, Franz and Heinrich, you guys are going to carry two-handed swords instead of your backup swords.” You say, “Okay, Franz and Heinrich, you guys are going to carry two-handed swords instead of pikes” or instead of halberds.

[3] As the illustration from Fiore dei Liberi’s treatise indicates, in medieval terminology, a knight’s “axe” could be what modern people tend to call a pick or hammer.

[4] Remember, we’re in the Renaissance. Enemy infantry might be unarmored - and if so, a two-handed sword will make short work of them - but there’s no guarantee of that. There was no guarantee even in the Middle Ages that “common” enemy soldiers would be unarmored, actually; still less so as the Military Revolution rolls on.

 

Ill take a blacksmithing hammer, good amount of weight, one handed, and doesnt need to be sharpened to do crap loads of damage.




With that being said i do own a fare amount of swords.

 

Also remember that a reinforced riveted plate armor is not going to crack easily. Hammer or a pick might be indeed the way to go if you're going to be trying to hurt the armor but really you're not going to want to go through the armor but instead knock the other guy down while avoiding his attacks or so.
As for hitting a plated guy in the helmet - it's a nice theory but most helmets were actually reinforced with thick arcs and such against hammers. Furthermore they rested on the shoulder plate and transferred much of the energy to the torso portion of armor while spreading it.

And for sideways attacks they often had those things on the shoulders which in combination with raising your shoulder help deflect sideways attacks.

Sure, people in plate died too but plate was no joke. Funny point about how as full plate was taken into use the knights etc. who used it stopped using shields altogether. There was no point using a shield.

As someone said

"Imagine SEAL level special forces operator, trained from the age of 7 wearing a tank"

Of course not every knight is a martial arts miracle. But at least you'd expect them to have years upon years of training even if the training wasn't always given to "fertile soil".

 

Spoiler: I laughed pretty hard...

And staying on topic in the off topic:

Where there is mill there is a road. True.
It's far easier to bring the grain to the mill by a road and it's wise to build the mill by a road.
True.

 

From a post where this attitude is compared to how people respond to mental illnesses.

 

Now THATS a book I can get behind!

 

We've got a "Viking Restaurant Harald" in the capital! Must see!

 

Theres the Valhalla pub and eatery in the city i live. Also don't think any norse settled here. NC is a bit south.

 

cause...no part of this is inexpensive

edit: tbh should i have put this in the porn section?