Bardiche

The bardiche is a polearm consisting of a long, curved, single-edged axe blade mounted on a shaft typically taller than a man, most closely associated with Eastern European and Russian infantry from roughly the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Its elongated blade, often affixed to the shaft at both the top and partway down its length for added stability, gave it a longer cutting edge than an ordinary poleaxe, useful for both powerful chopping strikes and for hooking an opponent's legs or weapon, and its long shaft could also be planted in the ground and used as an improvised rest to steady a heavy matchlock firearm, a dual role well documented among Russian musketeer infantry known as streltsy. The weapon remained in wide use among Russian and Polish-Lithuanian forces well after Western European armies had largely abandoned polearms in favor of pike and musket combinations, reflecting its particular usefulness to infantry who were also expected to serve as firearm support troops.