In a recent discussion about a certain series of fantasy novels on another message board, someone made the claim that during the Middle Ages, swords used in battle would not actually be sharp. The rationale for this was that if you had a narrow, sharp blade and struck somebody’s armor with it, your blade might snap, seeing as mideival iron was more brittle than the modern steel used in most blades today. So what’s the straight dope on this? True, false, partially true? I’ve seen sharp swords in museums on occasion, but perhaps they were only used for ceremonial purposes and not in real battles.
No they had to be sharp, other wise you would have stayed with the club and mace type weapons. whet stones have been around for centuries just for this purpose , most likely started with sharpening Axes for wood cutting.
I’d say the metallurgy of the swords was not the greatest , but the roman short sword was meant to stab , the cutlass was meant to hack and the sabre was meant to hack heads from atop a horse.
Declan
If anything, medieval swords seriously needed to be sharp. The standard armor at that time was generally leather based. Mail was horribly expensive, so few actually owned it and pseudo-mail was, basically, rings sewed onto leather. Later developments included small plates like fish scales, but the shoulders, arms, and legs were still often leather (and the scaled plates were still sewn to leather).
Plate armor did not arise until the Renaissance was nearly upon Europe, coming to full use in the early 15th century. At that time, the mace became a more common weapon to use to smash plate, but the swords needed to remain sharp to handle the more lightly armored infantry.
I wonder if the person making the claim for unsharpened swords was confusing the fact that sword points might not always be attended to that carefully, since broadswords were definitely used as edged, not thrusting, weapons. (Even there, I would want to see some evidence for the claim.)
It doesn’t make much sense really. Putting a ¼” sharp edge on a sword 3” across won’t reduce its strength to any appreciable degree. What this person is effectively saying is that by blunting a sword you make it stringer. Doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t have a cite, but I’ve heard basically the same thing. The main reason for using a sword even after armor started getting better was that a sword concentrated all of its force onto a smaller area when it hit, which made it better for going through thick armor and breaking bones than a club. When used in this manner, the sword certainly didn’t need to be all that terriblysharp, so some swords placed their emphasis on weight rather than cutting ability.
I have no idea how accurate this is. Just repeating what I’ve heard, and pointing out that the OP isn’t the only one who has heard this before.
I had heard that the swords became blunt very easily, so swordsmen had a little guy or a bag on their backs to carry around extras.
Sharp doesn’t necessarily mean thin. Honing down a sword so it looks like a straightedge razor >- would be stupid, because the blade would deform under a solid blow.
But sharpening a slashing sword to the same profile as an axe would make sense. The solid wedge > offers enough support to maintain the edge.
In The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott (I am not claiming that SWS is a reliable expert on historical accuracy, far from it), King Richard is at a party with Saladin. They get to comparing swords. Saladin throws a pillow in the air and holds the edge of his sword under it as it comes down. The pillow is sliced in two by its own weight. Richard’s heavy sword can smash, but it cannot perform such subtle feats of sharpness. I think Scott’s point was that while Richard’s sword was of iron, Saladin’s was of Damascus steel, which could take a finer edge.
Sharp-edged slashing swords were very much a part of Dark Age and Mediaeval warfare. Archaeological evidence, of both sharp weapons and the injuries they inflicted, is quite abundant - for example, here’s a discussion of the evidence found in the mass graves from the Battle of Visby (1361).
This site discusses arms and armour of the Viking period - it’s unwise, I think, to dismiss the pattern-welded swords of the time as metallurgically unsophisticated. (Pattern welding had been around, by this time, long enough to be a standard in sword construction … I believe there’s evidence for the Saxons using it in the 7th-8th centuries.)
I had a Buddhist monk once explain to me that his katana (I’m still not sure why a Buddhist monk would have a katana) was only sharp at the last 12 or so inches toward the tip of the cutting edge. The rest wasn’t necessarily blunt, but certainly not intended for cutting. The point IIRC was proper technique for the katana utilizes ony this part of the blade. May have been feeding me a line, but then this is possibly what your friend was thinking?
Define “sharp.” If you are talking a shaving edge then no, European swords were not sharp. A shaving edge requires a bevel of somewhere around 22 degrees or less which requires an extremely hard steel which in turn tends to make the metal brittle. Think of files or straight-razors which hold an edge but will snap instead of bending if stressed.
Most swords have a much larger angle on the cutting edge, closer to 40 degrees which leaves a lot of metal behind the edge. These will still cut meat just dandy and also have the mechanical strength to handle bashing on armor.
An exception to this would be some of the SE Asian swords I have which are shaving-sharp but were generally not required to hack through armor.
Regards
Testy
Inigo.
In Kali class, they taught us that the last third of the blade was for cutting, the center for blocking, and the third nearest the handle for trapping. Kenjutsu might have a similar philosophy. It makes sense to use the tip for cutting if you think about how fast that part of the blade is moving when used for slashing. OTOH, I have a WWII katana that is sharp all the way down the blade.
Regards
Testy
I realize we’re in GQ here, but I don’t have any cites for this. Speaking from years of talking to people in the SCA who have done the research, the general concensus is that until people stopped wearing armor, swords weren’t much sharper than your typical table knife. Making them sharper than that would make the edge brittle; plus, it’d just get blunted the first time you used it in a fight.
Prior to the use of mail, a sword would cut through leather or cloth armor. When used against mail, the sword would either break the bones under the mail if the bones were close to the surface or create a deeper wound, forcing the mail into the wound without actually “penetrating” the armor. Ouch.
Once people began using plate armor, the swords were used to bend or break the armor, hopefully bending or breaking the bones underneath the armor as well. As people began using axes and maces more (because they worked better at bending and breaking things…) swords began to be more specialized in use (“not so clumsy or random as a footman’s mace…”); there is a famous book by one of the premiere sword instructors of the 15th century (Fiore de Liberi) in which there are many techniques which involve grasping the blade of the sword and using the weapon as a big, pointy crowbar. Doing that with a razor-sharp sword would be a Bad Idea. Do a Google search on Fiore de Liberi, or go here. Okay, so I do have a cite. Sue me.
Once the Welsh longbow, heavy crossbow and early guns improved to the point that somebody could poke holes in plate at range, people stopped wearing metal armor except for casual evening wear. At that point, the rapiers, sabers et al. began to appear, and they were definitely sharp enough to shave with.
Armies have carried whetstones and sharpening wheels with them since before Ceasar was a corporal.
During the period of classical Greek warfare, blades were certainly sharpened. Soldiers back then wore quite a bit of armor. Swords were sharpened in the Roman armies, they fought both armored and unarmored enemies. At Waterloo, swords were sharpened.
(Oddly, I cannot recall first person account describing putting an edge on a blade in the American Civil War.)
Why not keep it sharp? As discussed above, it would not weaken the blade, and it would give you and edge (sorry) if you found an opening.
Of course swords broke all the time (especially in Greek and Roman times). In those stressful periods, it seems as though spare ones were just laying around.
The standard “knight’s sword” of the Medieval period was sharp- but it was more of an ax type sharp as opposed to a razor sharp. In other words, the design was more of a chisel that a razor. It’s ridiculous to think they weren’t sharp- but you likely wouldn’t cut your finger by idly touching one either.
I recall seeing a History Channel show wherein they mentioned that you do indeed only block with the middle/back part of the blade (which are, as any sabre fencer will tell you, the strongest parts of the blade, the read being much more so than the middle). I also recall that the armor the samurai wore was hardened leather and not metal (may be wrong though), so a cutting blade would have to be sharp. The reason for not parrying with the sharp part of the balde was precisely because it was so sharp as to be brittle, and should that part of the blade be struck and broken, you’d get a large[r] part gouged out, making potentially weakening the edge further.
Recall that in most katanas (at least the few I’ve seen), there’s a “scallop” pattern where the blade is sharp enough to cut, this part is where the “breaking” would most likely occur.
Essentially, the edge a blade can hold is dependent on the quality of the steel, the quality of the forging, and the quality of the maintenance. It’s safe to assume that across the span of history and geography, people have wielded swords of every degree of sharpness. The scarcity of resources and expertise made good swords expensive, so the sharpness of a sword would be closely tied to one’s class. I would expect that you would find varying degrees of sharpness within a single army, probably within each unit (except maybe in well-funded standing armies, which were rare), and certainly in mercenary forces. Ultimately though, it really doesn’t take a very sharp 4-5 foot blade to do some serious damage to a moderatly armoured human body.
The scallop pattern is called the “hamon” and is a tempering line where the clay coating was scraped away before quenching. As far as blocking with the spine or flats of the blade vs the edge, there is a lot of controversy about that. Blocking edge-to-edge will almost invariably ding your blade and require a blacksmith or the like to repair it. There are a lot of antique swords that show this type of damage though. If I were doing the blocking I’d get anything I could between me and the oncoming sword and worry about the damage later. 
As an interesting aside, I have an old bolo from the Filipines that is made from laminated steel, I’d say about 64 layers. The bolo shows exactly the kind of damage you’d expect from doing edge-to-edge blocks. The steel in that is quite soft but extremely sharp. A good smith could probably fix it easy enough.
Regards
Testy
AFAIK, katanas are sharp all the way down. Their use is more of a full-length slicing action rather than chopping, as with other swords; I’m fairly sure that every time I’ve seen somebody demonstrating chopping off a limb (using the rolled-up reed mats rather than actual arms, of course) they started with the middle of the blade. The idea was to behead your opponent in the same stroke as drawing the sword, after all.
Cavalry sabers, on the other hand, are only sharp for the last 12" or so on the front, and 6" on the back, because they’re supposed to be beaten against each other.
Cites: that same History Channel show a few other posters mentioned, and Cold Steel’s “Sword Proof” video (which, if you have the patience to sit through all the macho posturing, is actually pretty nifty: after all the “chopping up random things because we can”, the founder of the company and a fencing instructor give a lesson on sabre fencing, using cavalry sabers).
I don’t know anything about swords or sword-fighting. But a question for the folks that do:
Japan’s samurai culture is one of many martial arts areas where there seems to be a lot of hocus-pocus, particularly about “lost” metal-working arts. How would the finest hand-wrought medieval Japanese blade (or European blade for that matter) compare with one made today using modern metallurgical knowledge and fabrication techniques? Were they really doing anything 500 years ago that we couldn’t do today, if we wanted to?