THE HISTORY OF WEAPONS

I love ancient history. What about you?

Hi everyone! You know, I love history a lot and today I’d like to tell you about a side of history I find really fascinating: the evolution of weapons through the years, from the Prehistoric Era to the Middle Age. My interest in ancient history is also  due  to my favourite videogame, do you remember my previous post?

Hoplites

Since the seventh century b.C. Greek armies were formed by hoplites. Hoplites (especially the Spartan ones) were heavy soldiers with a bronze armour and a round shield made of bronze and wood. They had iron weapons, a long spear and a short sword. There were also other types of soldiers, like slingers, who threw rocks on the enemy with a sling, archers, that used bows and arrows, and peltasts, who were skirmishers and javelimen,  their duty was to throw missile spears to the enemy and then retreat. There were also light hoplites (in the Spartan army, the Periokois) and light troops (always in the Spartan army, the Scirities, who came from the Arcadia, a mountain region near Sparta).

Macedonians vs Greek

In 338 b.C., in the battle of Chaeronea, the king of Macedonia, Philippus, beat the Greek thanks to a special type of soldiers: the pike men, or the Pezeterians. They were light wore, with a little shield on the left shoulder and a long two-handed pike, called Saris. After the dead of Philippus, his son, Alexander the Great, conquered a great part of the knew world by his Pezeterians. But the Macedonian phalanx wasn’t invincible. After many years, in 197 b.C. in the battle of Cynoschephale the Romans lead by the consul Flaminius, destroyed the Macedonian army. They were victorious because of the flexible use of the party of the army and because of their new type of weapon, the gladius.

The gladius

The gladius was a very short and sharpened sword. This kind of sword was used in a very compact formation called Testudo. After the battle of Cynoschephale, many Macedonian soldiers said that they were shocked because of the injuries of their dead companions.

The Middle Ages

The use of the gladius ended with the fall of the European Roman Empire in 476 A.D.  After that year, the Middle Ages began. During that time the knights, heavy soldiers with strong armours began to use long swords.

There were different kind of weapons in every different country, like the Scottish sword, the Italian sword, the allobars and the Northern Europe Weapons. The deadliest weapons used since the Scottish Revolution to the discover of the fire weapons was the English longbow. It was rather infamous  because when an army used that weapon, there were deadly shoots of arrows in the battlefield.

Then, in the sixteenth century, the fire weapons were developed in China and the large usage of the previous weapons decreased.

That’s all! I hope you enjoyed reading. 

I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below

  Francesco Giammei (2sc)