Steel, Shafts and Hammers: Hand Weapons from the Greek Shortsword to the Lance

The xiphos was a double-edged Greek shortsword, usually 45 to 60 centimeters long, descended from the Mycenaean Naue II as bronze gave way to iron. Hoplites drew it only after the spear was lost, broken or thrown, so it was a backup weapon rather than a first choice.

The kopis was a single-edged, forward-curving Greek sword whose blade let a wielder strike with the momentum of an axe. Xenophon recommended it for cavalry, and the Ottoman yatagan may descend from it, though scholars disagree on whether its origin was Greek, Egyptian or Etruscan.

The military flail was adapted from the farm threshing tool, and the chain-and-head kisten form is attested among the Rus by the tenth century. Hussite forces used flails extensively from 1420 to 1497, but the ball-and-chain of popular fiction was historically rare.

The naginata put a curved single-edged blade on a long shaft, with the earliest clear references dating to 1146. It proved effective at unhorsing mounted samurai in the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185, a lesson that helped drive the adoption of greaves, and it became the weapon of the onna-musha, with Tomoe Gozen as its best-known wielder.

The halberd joined an axe blade, a spike and a hook on a shaft five to seven feet long, letting a halberdier chop, thrust or drag a rider from the saddle. Swiss halberd infantry won at Morgarten in 1315 and Sempach in 1386, and the weapon survives today with the Vatican Swiss Guard.

Full war hammers became standard battlefield weapons in the mid-fourteenth century as a direct answer to plate armor, which a blade could not reliably cut but a concentrated blow could dent or punch through at the joints. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were also decorated marks of status among Central European nobility.

The katana was a curved, single-edged Japanese sword forged with a hard edge and a softer core, worn edge-up in the sash for quick drawing. It gradually replaced the straighter tachi as the samurai sidearm and remained the warrior class weapon until the Meiji edict of 1876 ended sword-carrying.

The Scottish claymore, from the Gaelic for great sword, was a two-handed sword with forward-angled quillons, in military use from roughly 1400 to 1700. The Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689 marked the last major engagement in which claymores appeared in significant numbers.

The Zweihander was a German two-handed sword of up to 213 centimeters that peaked in the sixteenth century, the hallmark of the Landsknechte. The Black Band fielded 2,000 two-handed swordsmen among its roughly 17,000 troops.

The rapier was a long, slender thrusting sword that emerged in Spain and Italy in the sixteenth century, chiefly a civilian sidearm for dueling rather than standard military issue. Fencing manuals by masters such as Camillo Agrippa and Ridolfo Capoferro systematized its use, and its legacy lives on in modern fencing.

The cavalry lance, a shock weapon nearly three meters long, enjoyed a major revival in the Napoleonic Wars. As late as 1914 half the troopers in each Russian regular cavalry regiment carried lances, as did all Cossacks, though the weapon proved clumsy against sabres in close melee.