Debate time.
Sorry, but this isn't accurate. By this point in time, the missle weapon--bows, crossbows, gunpowder weapons--were becoming more and more dominant, and pole weapons were more and more in use because of missle calvalry, the increasing obsolescence of knights, and advances in tactics, not because of the armour.
Ah, I meant the 15th century, before handheld gunpowder weapons were worth a damn, sorry. In which case what I said still stands, because swords were more or less unused, and missile cavalry were almost unheard of, at least in European combat.
Once again from the top: Swords could, and did, penetrate even high quality plate. Even if you want to pretend that they didn't, such plate had gaps and weak points, which someone with enough skill could certainly pierce with a sword.
Surely you can see the problem with this? A sword wielder was at a huge disadvantage to a mace wielder, because while a sword
could injure a knight through a weak area in his armour, albeit with a extremely difficult thrust, a mace wielder could kill or cripple his enemy with a hit to almost any part of the body, and could still kill in the same manner as a sword due to the spike most would have at the tip. A mace is roughly the same weight as a sword, if not lighter, and easy to handle without exquisite balancing, as the majority of weight is concentrated at the end. The comment someone mad earlier about the sword being the only weapon you could disarm someone with is pure nonsense, i would like to hear the logic behind it.
People fought duels in plate, after all. Duels were typically fought to at least the point of first blood. Someone eventually won the duel. This even happened in tournaments, where tournament armour was worn--and tournament armour was even heavier and more resistant than battlefield armour.
.
I would like to hear a source stating most medieval duels were fought with swords. More importantly, you seem to be under the impression that I think swords cannot hurt a man in plate armour. They can, but it is much, much harder than using a polearm or flanged mace.
Polearms had reach, and required less skill to use, which is why swords were less common. Not because of the armour, but because it was a lot cheaper and easier to hand a bunch of peasants and half-trained levies polearms, than to spend years to decades, training knights--knights at that point becoming obsolete because of improvements in gunpowder and crossbow technologies.
You do know that the main meelee combatants in that period were men-at-arms? Plate armoured, highly dedicated and trained soldiers. Wielding polearms, with rare exception. Levies only became common again once gunpowder weapons were refined enough to change the face of battlefield combat, rather than just siege warfare. So these soldiers were being trained from early or pre-teens with polearms. Even archers, who generally carried some form of melee weapon, most commonly pollaxes, would be training for a year or more using them. After all, war is long periods of boredom interspersed with short periods of excitement.
If you really want to insist that swords can't penetrate steel, then please explain why there were any armour improvements after maille? Once you had steel maille, the theory should go, it should be impossible to cut through it with a sword, making the full chain suit impenetrable.
This is both a strawman and a logical fallacy. Again, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that
anyone is saying that swords cannot hurt people in plate armour. And the latter part is just silly, even ignoring why improving armour is a good thing even when the chance of penetration is small, and that maille doesn't cover as much of the body as plate does, armour wasn't designed to protect against only swords y'know.
It wasn't, and neither was plate. Plate was better for a lot of reasons, but it certainly wasn't a "cloak of invulnerability".
No-one said it was. But it did render swords more or less obsolete for a good hundred years, because there were
much more suitable weapons available.
As for sources? Well, any books on medieval warfare of the period should tell you, and for me this has brought back the old history itch, so I think I'll dig out some of mine later for a re-read. But for all you who don't enjoy textbooks. the best easy to read information is probably of the fictional kind, and the best I've ever read has to be "Azincourt" by Bernard Cornwell, the author of Sharpe. As well as being well researched, it's fantastic.
Author
Topic: Weapon research (Read 149582 times)