Force
Swiss Guard
Swiss mercenaries whose pike squares dominated 15th-century battlefields; the Papal Swiss Guard still serves with halberd and sword.
Swiss soldiers were the Renaissance's most valuable export. The cantons' pike squares — citizen levies drilled to move like machines — destroyed Charles the Bold's Burgundian army three times running in the 1470s, and every crown in Europe bid for Swiss regiments after. 'Pas d'argent, pas de Suisses' — no money, no Swiss — became diplomatic proverb, and Swiss mercenaries anchored French royal armies for three centuries.
The Papal Swiss Guard, founded when Julius II hired 150 Swiss in 1506, is the surviving institution of that world. Its defining hour came at the Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527: 147 of 189 guardsmen died on the steps of St. Peter's holding the Landsknecht assault long enough for Clement VII to escape down the fortified corridor to Castel Sant'Angelo. Recruits still swear their oath each May 6th.
Today's Guard — Swiss Catholic males, sworn to the Renaissance halberd and trained on modern sidearms — is the world's smallest and oldest continuously serving army, its striped blue-red-yellow gala uniform a Renaissance survival (Michelangelo's design by legend only). Behind the pageantry stands the memory of 1527 and the Halberd-armed pike world of the cantons that made the word 'Swiss' mean unbreakable infantry across Europe.
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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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Morion Helmet
The morion is the open steel helmet with a tall comb and a brim swept up to points at front and back that armed pikemen and arquebusiers across sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. Light, cheap to make and easy to see and fire from, it suited the new infantry of pike and shot. Its crescent shape is forever associated with the Spanish conquistadors, though the classic comb morion actually came into general use a generation after Cortés and Pizarro. It still survives on duty today, on the heads of the Vatican Swiss Guard.