Various Blunt Weapons of Medieval Europe

Various blunt weapons in medieval Europe

Warfare was frequent in medieval Europe, especially after the start of the Crusades in the eleventh century. Along with the wars and exchanges with the Eastern Roman Empire and the Muslim world, Western Europe's military technology made great progress, and all kinds of weapons that were easy to use, looked ferocious, and sounded scary came out.

Below: an image of crusaders from the movie Dynasty of Heaven.

Advances in metal forging, in particular, allowed Europe to make great strides in armor. Along with the increase in defense power, a variety of blunt weapons came into being. Unlike China, which revered the whip and mace, Europe has always had a brain on hammers, the types of which are almost uncountable. The most feared of these, no more than the nail head hammer.

Nail hammer is called the star of the blunt instrument, the king of hammers, listen to the name of the people can not help but have some pain in the ceiling. However, this is thanks to the expressive power of our Chinese language, is our translation of good, not the foreign devils out of the whole name.

Nailhead hammer is actually Mace, Morning Star two kinds of hammers collectively, sometimes, we will also be the Chinese War Hammer (War Hammer, sometimes also translated as armor-breaking hammer) classified as a kind of nailhead hammer.

Below: Mace.

Below: Nailhead hammer (Morning Star).

Below: War Hammer (War Hammer), also considered a type of Nailhead Hammer.

The three hammers above are hardly related in shape, but all are distinctly different from the traditional gudgeon hammer and bone. To talk about hammers, China has been playing with bonedo since the Stone Age, and a stone bonedo made of coal-refined stone was found at a site more than 5,000 years ago. The shape of this bone has been similar to that of the latter-day Golden Melon Hammer.

Below: a stone bonnet with a hole in the center for a wooden handle.

The limitations of a weapon like the Golden Melon Hammer are also significant, and that is that it relies purely on blunt force, hitting the target with a large contact area. Physics says, the contact area is large, the pressure is small. Therefore, how to reduce the contact area has become a priority, which is why the Golden Melon Hammer will have a "prong" reason.

Below: A pronged hammer.

Below: A ribbed bone.

Then, later on, the Central Asian region invented the Page Hammer based on the Golden Melon Hammer, which brought the killing power of hammers into a new era. As you can see at a glance, the Mace-type nailhead hammer, in fact, can be considered a kind of page hammer in the classification, but there are some small differences with the general page hammer.

Below: page hammer.

Below: Mace hammer.

The Mace type nailhead hammer has a sharper page blade, which naturally creates more pressure when hitting a target. This type of hammer is actually available in China, just not used as much.

Below: The Ming Dynasty page hammer is very similar in concept to the Mace hammer.

But the nailhead hammer was clearly more present in Europe. After the fifteenth century, plate armor became popular in Europe, armor forged from whole plates of iron that not only provided more complete protection, but was generally curved in shape and slippery enough that many weapons bounced or slid away when struck.

Below: many people think that European knights used plate armor during the Mongol Western Campaign, but in fact, only scale and lock armor was available in Europe at the time, and early plate armor didn't appear until the late 14th century.

Before the scale armor, tie armor, lock armor, are steel parts braided into, tie armor tie a little tighter may still be able to prevent, lock armor, scale armor a hammer basically internal injuries. In the face of plate armor, general page hammer and golden melon hammer that can have little effect, even if you can smash a dent in the plate armor, the person inside is still wearing a cotton like lining, can be an effective buffer against blunt force.

Below: a European-style armored suit.

So the Mace-type nailhead hammer was born, and while it was a limited improvement over traditional page hammers, the sharp projection ensured that it wouldn't slide away when it hit plate armor. Early plate armor was made of cooked iron or mild steel, and a single blow from the hammer was enough to knock the wearer off his feet.

Below: A dented breastplate.

It was said to be hard to hammer him to death, but that's what they wanted. At the time, those who could afford to wear plate armor were mostly of the knightly class, and why not capture a knight alive and not only collect the bounty from your own master, but also ask for a large ransom?

Of course, you can't always think of ransom, but when the battlefield is at stake, you have to kill. Moreover, to hold people for ransom, that's what ordinary soldiers of peasant origin do.

As a knight, if you also think about how to put the detained for money, it seems to be too low-grade. However, full-body plate armor was essentially immune to swords at the time, and in order to effectively penetrate plate armor in melee combat, the War Hammer (War Hammer) was created and became a very mainstream weapon.

Below: A knight with a War Hammer.

The War Hammer is a later version of the Mace, appearing in the late 14th century when plate armor became popular. In contrast, the Mace-type nailhead hammer took shape in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Below: the hammer from "Dynasty of Heaven," the movie is actually from the twelfth century, before the hammer would have appeared.

The warhammer-type nailhead hammer did not appear in Chinese history, at least not on a large scale, and was indeed unique to Europe. The reason for this is also very simple, this kind of weapon was born entirely for plate armor to beat each other up, ancient China did not popularize full-body plate armor, so naturally, they could not use this thing.

The head of the war hammer had a beak-like point at one end and a flat hammer at the other, so that when attacking, one could use both the hammer end to smash people and the pointy end to peck them.

Especially when pecking, this thing is extremely powerful, the back of the hammer just become a counterweight, the formation of a great inertia, any how strong your plate armor, small hammer hammer as long as to hit you in the chest, a hammer down to ensure that let you re-understand life, twenty years later to become a good man again.

Below: The war hammer that pierced the chest armor.

Not only against plate armor, but most armor is ineffective in the face of a warhammer-type spike hammer. According to some modern tests, not only against ancient armor, but even against modern body armor, the Warhammer is still a hammer, a hammer that kills you, no matter what.

Below: a nailhead hammer that penetrates body armor.

Below: The hole in the vest.

The use of the Warhammer-type nail hammer was as common as the Mace-type nail hammer, and was among the more heavily armed weapons. It is recorded that during a late fourteenth-century revolt, the insurgents seized more than 3,000 warhammers in their arsenal, a quantity that would have been almost unimaginable in late medieval Europe.

However, the warhammer-type nailhead hammer also had a weakness compared to the Mace-type nailhead hammer, and that was flexibility. Although the weight of the two is about the same, but the Mace type nail head hammer in the use of the direction do not have to care about, the head of the hammer on all sides of the sharp prongs, where to smash is not to smash?

But the Warhammer Nailer only has two attack surfaces, so you need to pay attention to the direction when using it. However, the Warhammer Nailer was originally designed to be used to fight with people in plate armor, so it doesn't require a lot of dexterity. In contrast, the Morning Star Nail Hammer appeared very early, and its shape was simpler, with a handle and a spiked ball as the hammer head. In terms of application, it was not used as much as the other two. In fact, this type of hammer is the key to the name of this type of weapon.

Because it had a head full of nails, the Morning Star was designed like the Mace, with the nails serving to increase pressure and ensure that the hammer didn't bounce or slide away when it hit plate armor.

But in a sense, the Morning Star spike hammer was the one that equipped troops for the longest time. By contrast, the Mace hammer was withdrawn from the battlefield when the Knight class was ended, and the war hammer disappeared when the plate armor era ended.

However, the Morning Star hammer was retained because it was easy to carry (its head took up the least amount of space in comparison) and was powerful enough to kill. Only the nails in the head of the hammer became thicker and thicker in the plate armor era.

Below is a picture of a WWI-era British soldier's man-portable equipment, the highlight of which you can go and look for carefully: yes, the Morning Star-type nail-head hammer was still part of the army's fighting equipment until WWI, and it's considered to be one of the very few cold weapons still in use in the age of hot weapons.