Origin
Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a fragmented political entity whose member states produced varied weapons traditions. German swordsmanship schools (Fechtbücher) were highly influential, and German and Austrian armorsmiths produced some of the finest plate armor in Europe.
Holy Roman Empire Arms & Weapons
Overview
The Holy Roman Empire (962–1806) was a loose confederation of German, Italian, Czech, and other Central European states under an elected Emperor. Its weapon traditions reflect this diversity — German swordsmiths and armorsmiths in Augsburg, Nuremberg, Solingen, and Milan (when part of the empire) produced some of the finest arms in the world.
Armorsmiths
Augsburg and Nuremberg were the twin centers of German plate armor production. Master armorsmiths — Kolman Helmschmid, Jörg Seusenhofer — produced armor for emperors and kings across Europe. The Gothic plate armor style, with its distinctive fluted surfaces and vertical ridges, is associated with German smiths of the 15th century.
Milanese armorsmiths produced the competing Milanese style — rounder, smoother, arguably more practical.
Landsknechts
The Landsknechts were German mercenary infantry who dominated European battlefields from roughly 1490 to 1620. Armed with pikes, arquebuses, and (for elite Doppelsöldner) the enormous Zweihänder, they fought across Italy, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. Their distinctive slashed-clothing fashion influenced civilian dress across Europe.
Fencing Traditions
The German school of swordsmanship (Kunst des Fechtens) is among the most thoroughly documented medieval martial art. Master Johannes Liechtenauer's teachings (c. 1350) were recorded by multiple students and preserve a comprehensive system for the longsword, messer, dagger, spear, and mounted combat. Later masters Hans Talhoffer and Joachim Meyer built on this tradition.
Artillery
The Holy Roman Empire's gunpowder era saw significant artillery development. The siege of Constantinople (1453) — while Ottoman — used cannon cast in part by Christian engineers working in HRE territories. Imperial forces used artillery extensively in the Italian Wars and Thirty Years War.
This article is a stub.
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Arbalest
The arbalest was the heavy crossbow of the late Middle Ages, with a bow of steel or thick composite so powerful it had to be drawn with a windlass or a geared cranequin rather than by hand. Its draw weights ran to several hundred pounds and more, and its short, heavy bolts could pierce mail and some plate at close range. It was slow to load, so its users often fought from behind large shields called pavises, but it needed little training to shoot well, and it served in European armies and on city walls for two centuries.
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Arming Sword
The arming sword was the one-handed, double-edged sword of the medieval knight, carried from the eleventh to the fifteenth century with a shield or buckler. With its straight crossguard and heavy pommel it formed the cross shape that became the symbol of knighthood and the Crusades, and it was the sword of the Knights Templar and of every man-at-arms who fought in the Holy Land. Ewart Oakeshott's types X to XIV describe its development from a broad cutting blade to a tapering one made to thrust.
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Arquebus
The arquebus was the first practical infantry firearm, a matchlock long gun light enough to be fired from the shoulder or chest without a rest. Developed in the second half of the fifteenth century, it used a serpentine lever to lower a burning match into the priming pan, letting the shooter keep his eyes and both hands on the gun. Spanish arquebusiers won the Battle of Cerignola in 1503, the tercios made it half of their tactical system, and conquistadors carried it to the Americas. It was the ancestor of the musket.
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Gothic Plate Armor
Gothic armor is the name collectors give to the full plate harnesses made in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire from roughly 1460 to 1500, the high point of the medieval armorer's art. Slender, pointed and fluted, with rippled edges and cusped borders echoing the architecture of the age, the Gothic harness enclosed its wearer entirely in articulated tempered steel yet weighed no more than an infantryman's modern kit. Made by the great workshops of Augsburg, Nuremberg and Landshut, it was the rival of the rounded Milanese style and the ancestor of the fluted Maximilian armor.
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Great Helm
The great helm was the fully enclosed, flat-topped or sugarloaf helmet of the high medieval knight, worn from around 1220 until the mid fourteenth century over a mail coif and often over a smaller skullcap as well. Riveted together from several iron plates, pierced by narrow eye slits and breathing holes, it gave the mounted lancer the most complete head protection yet seen in Europe at the cost of vision, hearing and air. Topped with heraldic crests, it became the knight's badge of rank, and it survives in coats of arms to this day.
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Halberd
The halberd combined axe blade, thrusting spike, and back hook on a two-meter haft — a complete toolkit for infantry facing armored cavalry. In the hands of Swiss mountain levies it butchered the chivalry of Burgundy and Austria and built the Swiss military reputation that armed Europe's courts with Swiss guards. Duke Leopold of Austria and Charles the Bold of Burgundy both died under Swiss halberds, a distinction no other single infantry weapon of the age can claim.
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Landsknecht Zweihänder
The zweihänder was the great two-handed sword of the German Landsknecht mercenaries: up to 1.8 meters of steel with side rings, parrying hooks, and a leather-bound ricasso for the second hand. It was carried by the Doppelsöldner — 'double-pay men' — who earned that pay fighting at the front of the pike square, guarding the banner, and hewing into the opposing pike hedge. It is the largest sword ever carried into European battle in numbers.
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Longsword
The longsword is the two-handed knightly sword of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance: a straight, double-edged blade of roughly 33 to 43 inches on a grip long enough for both hands, with a simple cross guard and a heavy pommel that balances the whole. It was a cut-and-thrust weapon carried by men-at-arms in war, by gentlemen in the duel, and by the students of the great German and Italian fencing masters, whose surviving manuals make it the best-documented sword in European history.
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Military Flail
The military flail was a two-handed weapon made from the farmer's threshing flail: a long wooden haft joined by a hinge or short chain to a heavy striking bar, often studded or bound with iron. It is best known as the weapon of the Hussite armies of Bohemia, who fought from wagon forts in the 1420s and 1430s and defeated a series of crusades sent against them. The one-handed 'ball and chain' flail of popular imagination is a different and far more doubtful weapon, with little surviving evidence of real battlefield use.
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Morning Star
The morning star is a spiked club: a wooden or iron shaft topped with a heavy ball or cylinder studded with steel spikes, used across Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Cheap to make and brutally effective, it was a favorite of town and peasant militias, especially in the German lands and Switzerland, where long infantry versions were common. Its name is often misapplied today to the ball-and-chain flail, a different and far rarer weapon; historically, a morning star is a club, not a flail.
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Pike
The pike is the longest infantry weapon ever carried in formation: an ash shaft of 16 to 22 feet tipped with a small steel head, used by dense blocks of foot soldiers to stop cavalry and push through enemy infantry. The Swiss made it decisive in the fifteenth century, the German Landsknechts and Spanish tercios copied them, and for two hundred years the 'pike and shot' formation — pikes protecting musketeers — defined European warfare. The plug and socket bayonet made it obsolete around 1700, when every musket became its own pike.
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War Hammer
The war hammer is the late medieval answer to plate armor: a steel head with a blunt, often toothed hammer face on one side and a stout curved spike on the other, mounted on a short haft for horsemen or a long one for fighting on foot. Where a sword skidded off a steel breastplate, a hammer delivered concussion through it, and the spike could punch through plate or find the gaps. It was the knightly weapon of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its horseman's form survived into the seventeenth century as the nadziak of the Polish hussars.