Poleaxe

The poleaxe is a European infantry polearm of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, built around a wooden haft roughly five to six feet long topped with a combination head typically pairing an axe blade on one side with a hammer or spike on the other, and finished with a long spearlike top spike for thrusting. Designed specifically to defeat plate armor, which made cutting weapons increasingly ineffective, the poleaxe let an armored footsoldier deliver the concentrated force of a hammer blow, the piercing point of a spike, or the axe edge against gaps and weak points in an opponent's harness, and it became the preferred weapon for formal judicial duels and foot combat at tournaments among armored knights. Surviving fighting manuals from masters such as Fiore dei Liberi and the Burgundian tradition describe detailed poleaxe techniques, treating it as a primary weapon of skill for armored one-on-one combat rather than a simple battlefield tool.