The Blade Tale — A Brief History of the European Sword
Just about everyone on planet Earth has heard of a sword — that is, the funny-looking metal stick with sharp edges, held by a handle and used to chop and/or stab at enemy soldiers until they stopped flailing about. Occasionally, they were used for bashing too. Throughout the countless wars fought during the course of human history, the sword has been a staple of nearly every fighting force since someone thought to found a civilisation on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates Rivers six and a half thousand years ago.
Thus in Ancient Sumer and Egypt was born the Khopesh, or sickle sword. The first khopeshes were forged from copper and then arsenical bronze, an alloy of copper and arsenic that was a forerunner to true bronze (copper and tin). The earliest known depiction of the khopesh was on the Stele of Vultures — in the hands of Sumerian king Eannatum, who forged one of the world’s first empires in Mesopotamia c. 2500 BC. But how exactly did the Khopesh come to be?
Taking one look at the beef leg-shaped weapon, one might be forgiven for thinking that it was derived from an agricultural tool. Allow William J. Hamblin to elaborate. In his 2006 piece Warfare in the Ancient Near East, Hamblin asserted that the khopesh was an evolution of the Epsilon Axe, a bardiche-esque battleaxe so-dubbed because the tanged blade closely resembled the Greek letter ϵ. One can reliably assert that such an evolution happened because, quite simply, a metal blade is stronger and lighter than a wooden haft and has greater wounding capacity from the larger blade.
But the first known double-edged sword — the kind with which we are familiar today — may have emerged from the Hittite Empire, which took root in what is now eastern Turkey. More specifically, the earliest such swords were found in Arslantepe, the Hittite capital, with the earliest dating from approximately 3000 BC — five centuries before Eannatum got to empire-building. This weapon, henceforth dubbed the Dall’Armellina sword (for the Italian PhD student who discovered and identified it in 2020), was also wrought from arsenical bronze, the strongest available alloy before the discovery of tin allowed for the creation of stronger swords.
Weapons in the style of the Dall’Armellina sword took off throughout Europe throughout the Bronze Ages, being forged with leaf-shaped blades — the Greek Xiphos ranks among the most familiar to historians. Then, when the La Tene Celtic culture popularised ironworking, blades began to be forged from the much stronger and more common metal from 800 BC onwards.
Curiously, however, the xiphos never saw much use as a primary weapon in ancient Greece. This is because the ancient Greek states utilised the phalanx in battle — formations of spear- and shield-wielding hoplites. Exemplifying the strength of discipline and long arms, the phalanx came to dominate civilised warfare up until the fall of the Macedonian Empire after Alexander the Great’s death. The xiphos sword was only ever kept as a backup weapon in case the hoplite’s dory spear broke, the enemy was too close to stab, or if the spear was otherwise unavailable/unviable.
The end of the Alexandrian empire, however, created a power vacuum for a new superpower to arise and claim dominance. Enter Rome, whose rise to power commenced less than half a century after Alexander’s death in 323 BC. By the outbreak of the Punic Wars 59 years after that date, the Roman Army had proven itself to be one of the strongest, if not the strongest, in the civilised world. Its armoured, highly disciplined legionaries fought with the gladius shortsword, backed up by javelin-throwing skirmishers and light cavalry. With such an army as this, Rome built the largest empire that the world had seen at that time — and the longest lasting in history, the final death of the Roman Empire coming with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD.
In its time, the all-conquering Roman Empire set a trend that would come to dominate land warfare for almost two thousand years, and it did so with the gladius. The Greeks and Macedonians had already tried and proven the devastating power of formation tactics in their heyday with the spear-centric phalanx — the Romans refined those tactics to a bleeding edge.
A bristling line of spears could rip through scores of charging barbarians and horse riders alike, but so too could a marching block of swordsmen. And unlike spears, swords were tailored to strike out up close and personal. As the Carthaginians, who fought in classic Greek tradition, learned the hard way, keeping the sword as a mere secondary weapon would prove deadly. Roman tower shields and segmented armour could deflect spear thrusts with ease — and once the legionnaires got close enough, switching over to xiphos would be tantamount to fighting a shark in the sea on its own terms.
Of course, there were other reasons why the Carthaginian army fared so poorly against Rome, particularly Carthage’s overreliance on mercenaries and lack of discipline. And indeed, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps to bring the war to Rome itself is widely regarded as one of the greatest strategic manoeuvres of all time. Yet it was Roman tactics that won in the end — and not just in Carthage, but Gaul, Seleucia, Egypt, Britain, Judea and all the other nations which fell to the Roman sword.
Even after the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476, the sword remained the most prestigious tool of warfare throughout the period of European history known as the Dark Ages (c. 500–1100). Towards the dawn of the medieval era, the Carolingian sword, popularised by the soldiers of Charlemagne (748–814), came to merge the best traditions of the Roman spatha — the successor to the gladius — with the Germanic Merovingian sword. With an army of elite swordsmen at his beck and call, Charlemagne carved out an empire to become the first emperor to rule from Western Europe since the fall of Rome.
The Carolingian sword was the forerunner to the knightly arming swords that helped to dominate high medieval warfare, and the late medieval longsword that followed after. The inception of the longsword came with the refinement of steelworking, with tempered steel allowing for the creation of longer and stronger blades than had thus far been.
However, by the time of the longsword, the sword as a general weapon was facing a powerful competitor — gunpowder. Firearms were created as a low-cost, low-skill solution to the appearance of ever stronger armours and defences (you may be familiar with the evolution of military arms from an earlier piece of mine) — platemail had proven itself the pinnacle of contemporary personal defence. A fully-armoured knight on horseback being directly equivalent to the present day main battle tank, both in power and protection.
In the renaissance and early modern periods, European swords took two distinct paths. The first was developed in the vein of gunpowder: a weapon that could slide under armour plates and pierce the flesh from underneath. Enter the Espada Ropera — the rapier, a unique type of sword tailored exclusively for penetration as opposed to chopping. In Spain, rapiers (more specifically, the spada de lato forerunner) were the favoured weapons of rodeleros, swordsmen who fought alongside the more modern pike-and-shot troops in the colunella formation. However, while Spanish swordsmen were highly effective at breaking deadlocks between two pike phalanxes, they were vulnerable against just about everything else.
A fresh and disciplined pike square, in a strange inversion of the Rome-versus-Carthage situation, would obliterate a group of swordsmen, as would a cavalry charge. This inversion occurred largely thanks to the presence of gunpowder: heavy armour and shields (of the kind Roman legionnaires utilised) were no defence against a cast-iron ball flying at several hundred metres per second, so swordsmen couldn’t be bogged down by kilogrammes of redundant iron. Their bucklers were also far smaller than Roman tower shields, and pikes were far longer than Greek-style dory. The end result was the dissolution of the colunella in favour of the devastatingly effective tercio, which would be the staple of western European land warfare tactics for the next two hundred years.
The other evolutionary path taken by the sword was rather more elementary — make them bigger and heavier. This reached its logical extreme in the appearance of the Zweihänder greatsword in c. 1500, at the same time as the takeoff of pike-and-shot tactics. The German Landsknecht soldiers that popularised the Zweihänder used brute strength to smash through heavy plate, much like a warhammer, and the weapon’s reach was only moderately inferior to a pike’s. Zweihänders were further elaborated on with the Flamberge— the serrated blade of which could cut even at point-blank range, annulling the size disadvantage normally offered by such large weapons. Though certainly more powerful than most other swords before it, Zweihänders still suffered the same problems — swordsmen could be picked off from a distance. Thus they only lasted in widespread service for a hundred years, largely becoming a curiosity by the turn of the 17th century.
After the advent of gunpowder, sword and shield tactics all but died out in Western Europe. Their last use in a major battle fought between two European armies was at the Battle of Culloden (1746) — by which time the bayonet had become the dominant melee device amongst infantry. Less than a fifth of the Highlanders who fought the British there used the classic targe and broadsword, with most being drilled in the use of firearms.
The sword itself, however, fought on. They came to have three primary associations: cavalry warfare, ceremonial use and in duelling. Amongst the former, sabres first entered European battlefields in the form of the Polish szable, whose curved blade may have been inspired by Hungarian cavalrymen who in turn borrowed them from Turco-Mongolic weaponry. The sabre would come to be the staple of light cavalry warfare from the early modern period as late as the Second World War: the last known military unit to be issued sabres for combat use were Romanian horsemen as late as 1941. Heavy cavalry in turn used powerful cavalry swords until their obsolescence at the end of the 19th century, where they had been largely replaced with lances, revolvers and carbine rifles.
Then, after six and a half millennia of forging empires and conquering far-flung nations, the sword was used in European battle for the final time by ‘Mad’ Jack Churchill, who took 42 German prisoners in the Sicilian town of Molina in July 1943 with his basket-hilt broadsword in hand.
Thus with a bang ends the Blade Tale. I sincerely hope you’ve all enjoyed reading this brief history of European swordsmanship, and I will see you all again.
~ Harry