DCDC 3/18/08 - German longsword vs Italian longsword - pt 1

[JohnRaptor]

Slippery grass is a deadly foe.

[fdsv777]

Stop film the Shaolin fencing. Nobody fence like that

[bieberMAN93]

very nice!!!

[TheFrostedLlama]

Hey, i'm curious about the masks you guys are using. Little insight? ... Liechtenauer!!! ; p

[GetitUnderCool]

i never understood if longswords were meant to be sharp or not, in some pictures of the manuals the figures hold the blade of the sword

[temp54]

@GetitUnderCool They're meant to be sharp. It's just that when holding the edge your hand won't be cut, especially if you're wearing gloves.

[GetitUnderCool]

@temp54 well, maybe holding the blade was not recommended if not wearing gloves? because you cut your hand if you hold a sharp edge with naked hands! try to clutch tight the edge of a good kitchen knife and then tell me!

[temp54]

@GetitUnderCool @temp54 John Clements of ARMA has a video about it on her somewhere

[deathbyazure]

@GetitUnderCool with few exceptions, kitchen knives are not swords. One possibility I read is that the tip of the blade was razor sharp and the midsection was only "chisel sharp", made with half-sword in mind. Another is that medieval people had more calloused hands. Knives are meant to slice by drawing the edge along the surface, often repeatedly in a sawing motion, but swords are instead supposed to cut by impact most of the time. Swords therefore may not have needed to be as sharp as knives.

[GetitUnderCool]

@deathbyazure well that makes sense, if you have to face a chain mail wearing opponent a very sharp edge is not indispenseble, and sharpening only the "debole" (from the tip to the mid) of the blade makes sense too considering that is the part that has mor chances of hitting the opponent. however, i never understood why the katana was meant to be so sharp, yes, it was used against unarmored opponents, but it was also used in battlefields where warriors wore armors. maybe japanese armors were

[GetitUnderCool]

@deathbyazure not so good as europeans ones?

[deathbyazure]

This is just a guess, but I know that Japanese forging techniques were restricted by the low quality of their domestically mined iron and the lack of technologies for controlling the level of carbon in steel. They had to fold the steel to even out the carbon, similar to European pattern welding. Their technique was certainly innovative and clever to get around these handicaps, but they couldn't make a blade out of one piece of steel like European ones. Instead they had to weld different

[deathbyazure]

@deathbyazure types of steel that were hard, medium, and soft to make different parts of the blade. Maybe this composite technique limited the versatility of the blades they could make. Also, as far as I know the Japanese could make chain maille, but they didn't make plate armour until they came in contact with Europeans, probably for the same reason their swords were made that way. Being isolated on their island, they didn't have the technology or material to make large steel armour plates.

[deathbyazure]

@deathbyazure I just want to add that I'm not a trained scholar of Japanese arms and armour, so if someone who is one contradicts me then they are probably right.

[GetitUnderCool]

@deathbyazure i was talking about sharpness, how much it was important for european medieval swords.

it seems to me that since the birth of "urban swords" with the spada da lato/espada ropera/cut&thrust sharpness became more important than before, maybe because these swords were not used against armored opponents. what i said is that it makes sense that for longswords sharpness was not all important since they were used against armored foes, but why sharpness was so important for katanas?

[metalstrom001]

@GetitUnderCool

hrm im just into swords lately,(western and japanese),that's why i was lead to this youtube link. lol

so with limited understanding of sword play from any style, i am not certain if my answers valid, however, i would like to mention that during the japanese sengoku(medieval) period, the armors they ware are mainly made of wood or bamboo.

do you think that maybe this could be a reason to explain why the sharpness of katana can be effective in their war?

[GetitUnderCool]

@GetitUnderCool surely! a wooden/bamboo armor could effectively protect against arrows, but a sharp blade is still very effective against these 2 materials, against plate armors and chain mail however, sharpness is almost useless, they had to rely on impact power to break bones instead of cutting flesh

[deathbyazure]

@GetitUnderCool actually, I've looked at what I know and talked to friends and now I hypothesize that there's probably not a meaningful difference between the sharpness of longswords and katanas, or in the difficulty of slashing through plate and saumurai armors. The katana is probably capable of holding a sharper edge, and The longsword is obviously better for finding gaps in armor using the half-sword technique, but neither would have been used in a cutting motion against any kind of armor.

[deathbyazure]

@deathbyazure to elaborate, my friend says that just because samurai armor is made of lightweight materials doesn't mean it was flimsy or vulnerable to cuts. Which makes sense. A light material like a ceramic or wooden compound can be laminated and reinforced in multiple layers to be made very hard and sturdy, just as a heavy material like metal can be worked thin so that it's springy and light.

[deathbyazure]

@deathbyazure so actually, while I'm writing this I'm revising. It seems to me that the plates of samurai armor are basically cut proof for the purposes of one-on-one combat. However, it may be that it has more of a gap under the armpit or at the neck than European full-plate usually had. I therefore take it as a possibility that a draw cut or slash at these areas might have been possible, and could have been effective as a combat move.

[deathbyazure]

@deathbyazure If there was still a cutting vulnerability, and there were generally fewer hammer or mace-like weapons in their warfare, it seems the katana could combat samurai armor with a combination of point-stabbing, cutting with the edge, and pommel striking at key points. The specific weak points of their armor would have still been vulnerable to cutting, hence the premium placed on the sharpness of the blade's full length. This is an unqualified hypothesis by a non-expert, but there it is.

[GetitUnderCool]

@deathbyazure well, i was said that katanas had to be sharpened only once after being forged, while maybe longswords had a tendency to get dull more often than katanas (anyway, try to cut through steel with a katana and tell me what happen to its edge), anyway, katanas are also curved, and that means that slashing with a katana is a different thing than doing it with a longsword, in fact with a longsword you use the sword as a lever with your right wrist as fulcrum, while with a katana

[GetitUnderCool]

Rispondi a questo video... you tend to rub ( but not to much) the edge against the body of the opponent, doing so you can disembowel him even with little impact power (provided that he is not wearing a plate armoru or chain mail of course!). the lever thing that you do with the longsword however, the high impact power allows you to hurt the opponent even if the blade is not very sharp, and even if the opponent wears platearmor or a chain mail. by the way,

[GetitUnderCool]

@deathbyazure longswords and katanas were used to cut even against armored foes, i practiced kenjutsu for a while and even i used a keikogi i was told that combat against armor wasn't very different, and half-sword game is for very short distances. to finish, just remember that not everyone could afford chainmails, plate armours and samurai armors, so there were chances that those wearing such armors weren't fighting in the first lines, and sometimes not even fighting (italian condottieri

[GetitUnderCool]

@deathbyazure wore plate armours but being them commanders they didn't physically fight often, they wore plate armours for protection and rode horses in order to have better mobility on the battlefield, they carried swords only for emergencies, and i think that this applied even to other commanders in other places of europe and even japan, the only ones wearing full plate armours that physically fought were heavy knights, and the cavalry fights on the back of horses.

[Schattenninpo]

Nice footwork!

[volarion]

seriously. where can i get a mask like that or did you make them

[h3Xh3Xh3X]

Where can I buy a fencing mask like the ones you are using in this video? They look very effective!

[TheSeventhSin7]

4:23 nice spacatti

[TF0olery]

Great fencing guys.

Though personally I always put my money on Liechtenauer... Not because it's better, but because I'm loyal, lol.

Wow... That's about a thousand bucks of steel you're smacking around. Makes me feel poor with my little Hanweis.

[DireSloth]

Cool beans, it's great to see this stuff is still being studied. 3:25 was funny.

[Beliar49]

Which one is Italian and which is German?

[SkinnyGuy31]

@Beliar49 Looks like the guy who starts on the left and does the Oches guard early on (the one he holds up over his head with the blade aimed at the opponent) is using the Leichtenauer style, so he is Eric Wargo, and the other is Scott Aldinger. They look pretty similar, but Eric looks a little taller and has grayish pants and shoes, while Scott looks a tad shorter with a greenish cast to his pants and black shoes.

Of course, since you posted 2 months ago, you probably already know by now...

[Asgath]

Where can those helmets be found? I love 'em

Its nice to see the differences between the two styles used against one and another

[Leondrian]

What happened to part 2? I would really want to see that. Good fighting. 4:21 the earth wanted to tell you something, the only thing I have to nag about when I'm holding class: Deeper in your stance. Grass is traitorous, slippery as h**l. Got to learn that a couple of years ago when I broke my leg playing softball/baseball on a wet lawn. And it's really hard to hold a deep stance when one's pressed back. Cheers /Robert

[koloblican11763]

What steels are you guys using, I would really appreciate the info. Btw Fiore rules face :D.

[lhommedormant]

@koloblican11763

We're using Albion Meyers. The best steel sparring swords out there. And no, Liechtenauer rules. :)

[koloblican11763]

@lhommedormant I thought there was a possibility that they were Hanwai but then I saw they didn't have that weird flair at the cross, I don't like