"… Each took his own sword and boldly attacked the city."
(Genesis 34:25)
The history of weapons. This material appeared spontaneously. I just met on VO a remark about waving an eight-kilogram sword. Well, I wanted to tell you once again about how much this weapon, which was popular in the Middle Ages (and in antiquity too) actually weighed. Well, the collection of swords of the Metropolitan Museum in New York will help us in this story. All these swords can be seen in his exposition, and some are kept in storerooms.
The first swords appeared very early. And they made them from bronze. It was convenient, though not entirely. Because at first only a blade was cast from metal, and only then a wooden handle was attached to it. Experience has shown that this design does not allow chopping blows. As a result, both the handle and the blade began to be cast as a single unit. Such swords could both chop and stab. Armies armed with such weapons became massive.
Kingdoms were built with bronze swords. And in one, the most famous in our country - ancient Egyptian, the army was completely armed with bronze swords and daggers.
Such swords are of a type associated with the La Tene culture, named after an important Celtic monument on Lake Neuchâtel in present-day Switzerland and eastern France. Other anthropomorphic swords from various finds in France, Ireland and the British Isles show us the widespread distribution of the Celts throughout Europe.
However, already in the VI century BC. NS. in Europe, they knew how to process iron and make swords from it. One such sword was found by archaeologists on the island of Cyprus.
In the East, the rulers of the Sassanian period (224–651 AD) were almost always depicted with a sword suspended from their belt, the motive of a winner in battle. The swords were made of iron with wooden sheaths, which were covered with metal, and, in particular, among the rulers, they were always gold. Such swords were borrowed by the Sassanids from the Hunnic nomads who roamed Europe and Asia in the sixth and seventh centuries, shortly before the beginning of the Islamic era. They had a long and narrow handle with two finger rests, and the scabbard had a pair of U-shaped protrusions, to which two straps of different lengths were originally attached. The straps held the sword suspended from the warrior's belt in such a way that he could easily pull it out, even while sitting on horseback.
In Europe in the VIII century, the empire of Charlemagne was formed and the "Carolingian Renaissance" began. His warriors were dressed in chain mail and in scaly shells - horsemen who terrified their contemporaries with their iron armor and weapons. In addition to the long spear with a winged tip, their weapons were the long "Carolingian swords", which became European weapons for more than a century. They had a relatively small crosshair, a straight blade and a mushroom-shaped flat top.
The swords of the Vikings, the northern pirates who kept the whole of Europe in fear for more than two centuries, were carefully studied and classified by Jan Petersen, whose classification to this day is perhaps the best basis for their study. For his fundamental scientific work "Norse Swords of the Viking Age" (1919), he studied 1772 swords, of which 1240 were typologized. So when, as often happens with us, it comes to the fact that, they say, "all this is fake", it is clear that such a quantity of rusty metal is simply impossible to forge, and most importantly - there is absolutely no need, since they are all found on the territory of Norway, although some also ended up in Sweden and Finland.
However, we are now least of all interested in the statements of the Novokhronolozhites, how many are the length and weight of the blades. So, the longest of the found swords (and the only one) has a blade length of 90.7 cm. All other swords are shorter. At the same time, the heaviest samples weighed about 1.5 kg: 1.443 kg, 1.511 kg, and one and even 1.9 kg. But the lightest weighed from 0.727 to 0.976 kg. At the same time, the length of the handle of 435 swords was from 8, 5 to 10 cm. And there were those who had it 8–8, 5 cm. That is, the hands of men of that time were smaller than they are now, and the men themselves were also smaller in stature than modern ones. What are their swords in 8 kilograms?
With the advent of solid forged armor, cutting swords gradually turned into stabbing ones, because it became almost impossible to cut through such armor, but there was hope to pierce. In addition, it was possible to get into the joints between the plates of the armor. Some swords therefore even stopped sharpening. For what? When the injection became their main task!
One and a half-handed swords could be used by both infantrymen and horsemen, who usually carried them at the saddle on the left. Their main task in battle was to help the rider fend off the infantrymen, but in a knightly duel it was also an indispensable thing - in fact, it was a universal sword, light enough for them to swordsmanship, but heavy to hit a soldier dressed in armor. They were also called bastard swords …
But we will tell about this type of cold steel some other time …
