Landsknecht, Halberds and Zweihänder

Part One: Landsknecht

The Landsknecht were an elite rank of warriors formed by Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II in order to combat any rebellions or opposition to his claim to power. Although they were highly trained and disciplined, they were, most of the time, drunken idiots. These are the kind of people that you would expect to see starting tavern brawls in a video game: they would often abuse their power over others and fight civilians in streets. The typical Landsknecht is a man in their 30s to their 50s in bright coloured puffy, slit-sleeved clothes and a funny hat with a backsword on their belt and either a German-style halberd or a greatsword in their hand. The clothes that they wore were not purely for fashion, however they were the thing that made the Landsknecht easily identifiable from other soldiers. Often, their only form of armour was a secret helmet under their hat or a breastplate and backplate on their chest, but Landsknecht in higher ranks than the mercenary, such as officers, would wear a cuirass designed to look like cloth- one of Maximillian's favourite styles.

A good example of that wavy, cloth-like Landsknecht armour.

Part Two: Halberds

In my opinion, the halberd is the most effective medieval-renaissance weapon invented, just on-par with the pike. Like the pike, it is a long poleaxe with a thrusting point and a secondary blade below the point and can be used on horseback or on foot, (although there are very few instances of the pike being used on horseback it would be quite practical and rather deadly) and like the pike it was used for hundreds of years, from the high medieval period to the mid-late renaissance. The most simple and effective formation of pikemen/halberdiers is the pike square formation. It is exactly what it sounds like: a 10 by 10 square of pikemen/halberdiers and was extremely good at defeating heavy cavalry as seen in the Battle of Nancy in 1477 when the Swiss pikemen defeated Charles the Bold of Burgundy's large force of heavy cavalry. It was so effective that even Charles himself died in the conflict, being sliced in two by, say it with me, a halberd.

An artist's impression of The Battle of Nancy

Part Three: Zweihänder

The German Zweihänder was a deadly weapon in war, often used by the rank of Landsknecht called the 'pike breakers'. Despite the name, the pike breakers would not actually cleave the wooden handles of the pikes in two, they would actually break up close-quarters fights between pikemen as the pikes were very long and in close-range fights would be useless and those kinds of fights could last for hours before one of the two armies either retreated or was mown down. The Zweihänder was a huge sword- almost as tall as (or taller than) the mercenary wielding it. The most common style was the flamberge (meaning flame) and had a distinctinctive wave to the blade, a wrap extending over to some of the blade and two spikes on either side of the end of the wrap, a huge guard and a very long handle. A good example of the Zweihänder being used against pikes and halberds is at The Battle of Kappel in October 1531. It was a religious conflict between the Protestant and Roman Catholic cantons of the Old Swiss Confederancy. Aah, nothing like 16th century wars between two groups of people with small differences in their religion. It was used to great effect and the Zweihänder-wielding mercenaries managed to hold off the pikemen for long enough to win the war.

The Unfortunate Journey of King Richard the Lionheart

The journey of King Richard the Lionheart back home to England was gruelling, long and expensive. Giant piles of his own silver expensive. In fact, it wasn't very much of a return journey as a very bad holiday, trekking through Jerusalem and much of Arabia through to Greece, Italy, Austria (where he was captured by Duke Leopold and then had to be let free for a king's ransom, England obviously having to pay up for him back), Switzerland and, finally, somewhere rotting in a field in France, after being shot by an arrow in a siege trying to reclaim parts of Normandy that the French had seized back from him (keep in mind that by then France was tiny and half of it was owned by England.)

He was besieging the 'tiny, virtually unarmed' castle of Chasluç-Chabròl when he was hit by a crossbow bolt in the shoulder on the 26th March 1199. It was not the actual wound that ended up killing him but the gangrene that it caused (Unlike what Robin Hood tells us: that he did come back and depose King John- old John took over the throne later in 1199 after Richard died.) He also was not a great man himself either- he showed extreme acts of anti-Jewish violence and it is reported that all of the Jewish leaders bearing gifts for him at his coronation were stripped down, beat and flogged before literally kicking them out of court. This was very strange as, a little over a century ago, William I of Normandy (more commonly known as William the Conqueror) had encouraged Jewish merchants to move to and live in England and treated them rather well in his kingdom.

Richard In the Crusades

King Richard, before his return journey from Israel, was fighting in the Third Crusade in a religious Holy War known as the crusades. In 1187, two years before his coronation, the genius Muslim leader Salah al-Din (known by the crusaders as Saladin) had reclaimed the holy city and pilgrimage site Jerusalem from the Templars, restarting the conflict between Islam and Christendom. The Pope at the time, Gregory VIII, called for another crusade to reclaim Jerusalem from Saladin, and so the Third Crusade was led by King Richard the Lionheart. After he heard that John, the soon-to-be-king had started a rebellion against him, Richard had to abandon the war and headed back to England, the Third Crusade failing horribly.

After giving up on Jerusalem, he set off for England again. The return journey, like the war against Salah al-Din, was a complete train wreck. Or should I say shipwreck, as merely days from departure he was shipwrecked on the Byzantine island of Corfu, and had to disguise himself as a Knight Templar to escape from the enemy Byzantines who were angry at him for trying to take the island of Cyprus. After stopping off at Italy, travelling through mainland Europe, being captured in Dürnstein Castle and having a terrible time in Switzerland, he was then killed in France, dying horribly. His successor, King John, yes, the rebellion-leader John, who took over after him, was no better.

The Battle of Crécy

What Happened

The Battle of Crécy took place in the year 1346 in August, as we all know that the best way to spend your Autumn, rather than sitting out in the garden and enjoying some tea and biscuits, is fighting in a massive brutal bloody war in a strange land miles from home full of your king's mortal enemies killing them to death. It was fought in the fields of Crécy, obviously, in northern France between King Edward III of England and King Philip VI of France. Also participating, surprisingly, was Englishman Edward the Black Prince, the son of Edward III , having a good old bit of father-son bonding through war with one of the greatest powers in Europe. This battle actually was one of the 56 battles throughout the Hundred Years War, a war that lasted 116 years. Although we mainly know it as a war between England and France, it really included numerous other countries such as Burgundy, (which, at that time was not part of France) Italy, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Weapons and Armour

The typical Crécy-era equipment was varied between the two main sides: the English had an army consisting mainly of longbowmen, equipped with at most a bascinet, maille coif ,  gambeson, and a few bodkin-tipped arrows to fire with their longbow, and the English knight would also wear a bascinet or great helm on the head, a maille coif, gambeson, maille shirt, coat of plates, pauldrons, bracers, greaves, elbow and knee plates, a knightly belt showing the coat of arms of the knight, and a sword or lance. Most knights rode on horseback while a few fought on foot, called, who would have guessed it, footmen. The French knights wore virtually the same as the English knights and the French crossbowmen wore the same armour as the English longbowmen but wielded crossbows rather than longbows.

Battle Tactics

The Battle of Crécy was a huge battle fought between men with huge armies, huge halberds and huge brains. King Edward positioned his men on a hill: they were strongly outnumbered but they had a strong advantage over Philip's French knights. Before the French crossbowmen had a chance to begin to advance up the hill, most of the English longbowmen went forward to the front lines and had beaten them back as Philip's knights spread out around the base of the hill. By then, a few French crossbowmen had began to retreat. Next, the French cavalry rode up the hill toward the English, but their pace was slowed by the rain of arrows upon them from the top of the hill. As all of the crossbowmen had either retreated or been killed, the last of the French horsemen reached the English, but were promptly killed immediately.