Okay we have sources for the Sassanin Heavy Horse and the Polish Winged Husaria impaling several people on the same lance.

So how did they accomplish this? How were the lances built? I.E what made the Lances where their wielders could pull this off?

Unarmoured flesh offers very little resistance to thrusts, so with some luck you could probably do this with a regular, thin spear and some luck.
With a lance, you merely hit the first man, and push him backwards so the lance hits the man behind. since no great force is needed to penetrate, it is largely a question of wether the first target bumps into someone else before falling.

True. And against a tightly packed mass of men you would a hard time not hitting someone

Although the Winged Hussars were well known for their economical use of the lance, I believe the multiple-impalement technique actually originated with the little known Order of the Knights of Shish during their existence in the 11th thru 13th century. The order actually chose their Warrior-Lord based on who could stack the most enemies onto one spear during a battle. This constant power struggle within the order led to the creation of a specialized form of extra-long spear referred to as a "Kabob" which they employed to deadly effect. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

And let's not forget that thing about classicizing references inserted mostly to make the writer sound erudite. I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case with the stories about the Sassanids and the Polish husars sticking more than one foe on one lance, but now I want to look at the actual words used and see how much similarity (if at all) they have to the same deed attributed to Palmyran cataphracts in the 3rd century(ish) AD.

In any case, I would rate it as one of those things that could plausibly happen, but nothing you would really try for.

Jean, thanks for humoring me!

Now I feel slightly less like the forum jackass. :)

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A small group of these Knights became mercenaries fighting the Turks

Yes, their sigil being the "flame and two-pronged fork" I believe.

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an unfortunate cooling of relations with Vlad ( Dracula ) as he couldn't forgive them about the tzaziki sauce because the use of garlic was taken by him as a personal insult !

Now you did it, I gotta go marinate some pork tenderloin. Alton Brown has a kick-ass recipe for tzatziki sauce by the way, AHEM, but that's another forum.

Sorry again guys. Excellent topic, please carry on!

Going back even further, Plutarch mentions that the heavy spears of the Parthian cavalry at Carrhae would often impale two men at once.

Wow, and Roman Armour and Scutums weren't exactly crap either

Can you cite that statement? :cool:

Thanks :D I'm curious were they doing it from a Frontal charge?

The context in Plutarch is pretty clear from this translated quote:

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When the Parthians began the attack, their slaves and clients, riding about on the flanks of the Romans, galled them with their arrows: and the horsemen in front, using their long spears, kept driving the Romans into a narrow compass, except those who, to avoid death from the arrows, made a desperate attempt to rush upon the Parthians; wherein they did the enemy little damage, but met with a speedy death by great and mortal wounds; for the Parthians drove their spears, heavy with iron, against the horsemen; and, from the force of the blow, they often went even through two men.

It was basically the closing stages of the battle, when the Roman morale was already breaking down. The Romans who got skewered were obviously the ones who left the safety of their own formation in desperate but misguided attempts to strike back at the Parthians, and it is as likely that they got stuck in the side or the back as on the front of their bodies.

In any case, Plutarch's account highlights one of the most notorious difficulties about the ancient accounts of two or more men being skewered by a single lance: they don't mention any single identifiable incident--"they often went through two men" vs. "at one point two of our men were skewered" and so on. This lack of precision likely indicates hearsay evidence at best and total invention at worst; a common suspicion held among the academic world is that "skewering two men" is just an exaggeration made to emphasize the enormous length of the cataphracts' spears, which were indeed so long (more like pikes) that they were known in Greek as kontoi (literally "oars" or "barge-poles").

I haven't had much luck locating the actual sources for the Parthian and Sassanid cataphracts--Zosimus didn't say anything about Palmyrans skewering two people at once, and I'm not done going through Ammianus yet, let alone the other sources about the wars between the Romans and Sassanids.


I'm not saying anything about the Polish incidents yet due to my lack of familiarity with the sources.

I should also mention that Cassius Dio gives an account of the battle of Carrhae in his Roman History that is different in many respects from Plutarch. For example, Cassius Dio says that the Romans were attacked by the cataphracts specifically when they were in locked shield formation (definitely a head-on engagement), just the opposite of Plutarch who says the cataphracts avoided the strong locked shield formation. Cassius Dio does not mention skewering two men at once, but does mention men being "carried off transfixed" by the lances. Perhaps another example of exaggeration? In any case, the great differences between Plutarch and Cassius Dio regarding this battle might encourage us to take these claims with a grain of salt.

For those keeping score this is in Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 40, 22.2

Oh, while we're at it, this:

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spurred him (The Horse) with his heels and rode upon his enemies at full tilt like a man made of iron or a statue fashioned with hammers. He carried a great lance that ran though every man it hit, and often carried away two men together pierced by one stroke

is the Heliodoros bit. I've seen a couple of webpages (and blogs) mistakenly attribute it to Ammianus, but that's just a misinterpretation of the information in some other sites like this post in Judith Weingarten's blog, which put the Heliodoros quote next to a genuine citation from Ammianus but didn't say that it was from Ammianus (though in hindsight she probably should have clarified that it wasn't Ammianus. I'll pester her about it tonight). So...yes, it's the fiction bit, and I'm still looking in Ammianus to say if he actually said anything about two men (or more) being pierced by a single lance. Now that I've looked so far without finding a single bit, I'm seriously beginning to doubt that he mentioned it at all.