Surviving gladii vary significantly in quality: some are little better than sticks of wrought iron, whilst some associated with high-status individuals are made from complex piling incorporating high-quality steel and quenching techniques to produce weapons as good as any that will be seen before the Early Modern period. It was the quintissential Roman weapon: simplified for mass-production by Roman smiths with a simple wooden hilt formed on a lathe, it was almost always used to stab at the enemy from close-range in tight formations equipped with the large square scutum shield. Celtic chainmail is one example, and the gladius was another: the short, straight-sided blade was originally the sword of ancient Iberians, whose weaponry the Roman military adopted when they acquired eastern Iberia during the Second Punic War (c. There is a strong argument that the Romans were so successful because they shamelessly stole cultural and military innovations from their neighbours, and merely applied them on a larger scale. It is the spatha that is the direct ancenstor of almost all medieval swords. We have frustratingly few surviving examples of either the gladius shortsword, and the long spatha, but very broadly we can chart the evolution of Roman swords from the shorter to the longer, in tandem with the ‘barbarianisation’ of the Roman military, and its increasing use of cavalry. Spathae The Roman Republic and later Empire used two primary swords, both inextricably interwoven with the society, culture and military tactics they used. We’ll chart a rough path through the past, visiting each category of sword as we pass by. Types of Medieval Swords The sword travels a long and varied morphological path through the medieval period, from the post-Roman spatha to the German Zweihander. Perhaps Polybius is taking license from the Celtic practise of ‘killing’ the swords of the defeated by bending them in half – or maybe that particular group of Celts’ blacksmith really just phoned it in that day. The Greek historian Polybius was dismissive of Celtic swords, saying that: “only the first cut takes effect after this they at once assume the shape of a, being so much bent both length-wise and side-wise that unless the men are given leisure to rest them on the ground and set them straight with the foot” But Polybius is likely indulging in Hellenic-supremacy: around two-thirds of Celtic swords that we have discovered would have been functional, resilient weapons capable of heavy battlefield use. Celtic smiths in the 1 st-millenium BCE were prolific with their experimentation in sword-making, and they pioneered ‘piling’: making a sword blade from multiple different types and grades of iron welded together softer iron for the core of the blade to give flex and resilience, with harder iron capable of keeping sharper on the edges. Blacksmithing with iron became an art, and gradually replaced cast-bronze, which produced brittle weaponry. Sword-making began to increase in complexity with the advent of iron forging in the Middle East – see for example, the akinakai created by the Scythians and later adopted by the Classical Greeks, which had an… ahem… ‘kidney shaped’ crossguard, like our old friend the medieval ballock dagger. Clearly, sword design had some way to go. However, there was no evidence of this found in situ, and reproductions (made from less toxic metals) have shown that they were pretty unwieldy and uncomfortable to use. The Melit swords are made from a single piece, of bronze, without any sign of a wooden hand grip there is some speculation that the swords might have had a simple leather hilt wrap. Several of them are gorgeously inlaid with silver – Zelda fans will notice the ‘Triforce’ symbol on the hilt, which was taken from Mesopotamian art. These swords are cast (as opposed to forged with a hammer and anvil) from arsenical bronze, a copper-arsenic alloy that would have been highly toxic to the metalworkers producing it. Although there is always dispute and debate around the topic, it is widely agreed that the ‘oldest’ swords yet discovered are the brace of 3rd-millenium BCE shortswords unearthed by the magnificently named Italian academic Marcella Frangipane in 1966 at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Arlsantepe (now Malatya, in modern-day Turkey). The Prehistory of Medieval Sword Swords begin to appear in the European context around the dawn of the Bronze Age, around 5,000 years ago. Real medieval swords were overlaid with all of these ideas simultaneously, and there is no better reason to browse the medieval swords for sale here and dive into the rich history of the medieval sword below. It is a complex symbol: the ultimate embodiment of knightly virtue, and a brutal symbol of cultural supremacy a tool to confer the divine right of kings, and the weapon of a rebellious Frisian peasant. The sword is a complex and hard-to-manufacture weapon, demanding the highest skills of a weaponsmith.
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