A Schlachtschwert, early XVIth century.
Spring steel blade of flat hexagonal section for most its length, mild steel fittings with hollow brass ball finials on the cross. Leather over thread over wooden core for the grip, and leather over wood for the sleeve (more about that below).
This is a tentative reconstruction of what a “proper” Landsknecht Greatsword could look like, such a they appear on period artwork, be it paintings like the Siege of Alesia by Melchior Feselen (1533) or the Battle of Pavia kept at the Royal Armouries (or the tapestries depicting that same battle, now at the Museo Capodimonte, made after sketches by Bernard van Orley), the Victory of Charlemagne over the Avars near Regensburg by Albrecht Altdorfer (1518), or the many drawings, prints and woodcuts by artists such as Reinhart von Solms, Jörg Breu, the great Hans Burgkmair, Niklas Stör, Hans Holbein (both Elder and Younger), Virgil Solis, Hans Sebald Beham, the legendary Urs Graf, Daniel Hopfer, Erhard Schön, Hans Schäufelein and others…All of them combined to give this result.
Such swords would be seen not only in the hands of a Doppelsoldner, but also carried by your Feldwaybel or an Edelman.
And it would be called a Schlachtschwert in the very captions of the illustrations I mentioned earlier (see Erhard Schön).
*Not* a “two-handed Katzbalger”, though the cross obviously echoes the S/8-shaped guard of the latter.
We clear on that ?
Good.
Very few of such swords are kept in museums out there, with a lot of them leaving me dubious regarding their authenticity. The one in Berlin seems to me to be the most genuine of all, and it is on its proportions that I based this piece, though the Berlin sword shows a fancy, diamond-pattern decoration on the quillions very much recalling the Katzbalger kept in the Museum of London.
Most if not all period illustration do not show such fancy details on the crossguards though ; they are actually rather plain, without even the ribbing/threading/filework you can find on Katzbalger crosses.
Hence I kept this one rather plain, with a square cross section with rounded corners, and some light filework at the center.
I also bent the quillions into an offset 8-shape rather than a symmetrical one, to be more consistant with the earlier examples visible in period artwork.
The main questioning was that sleeve at the base of the blade, present on a lot of the period artwork; its obvious function was to provide a spot on which to put the other hand - as can be deduced from Marozzo’s teachings for fighting against polearms - but the main issue was how was it made/what was it made of.
Elaborating on my previous experience and studies of such things on later Schlachtschwerter, I went for a basic construction of leather glued/stitched over a wood core made of two flat slabs, and force-slid down the blade. There is more than enough friction to keep it well in place, but it is still possible to take it off albeit with some effort. The end of the leather is cut according to period artwork, and flares out to accommodate the mouth of a scabbard if needed.
A simple decoration of plain lines on one side, and checkered on the other makes it also consistant with the artwork.
It is 139 cm long, the blade is 1083 mm long, 45 mm wide with a thickness of about 7 mm at its base, tapering down to 3.4 mm near the point.
The span of the crossguard is about 21 cm, though from one ball end to the other there’s about 73 cm of steel.
Weight is 2547 grams, point of balance 13.5 cm from the cross.
Twenty-eight hundred EuroUnits and it’s yours.