Hi,

I'm a reenactor( Swiss, 1475), and I'm interested to have a Swiss dagger like this one:

http://www.myArmoury.com/albums/photo/2053.html

Did someone know if this exact shape of swiss dagger is good for my reenacting period?

Thanks!

François L'Archevêque

In a word yes. It's my understanding that Holbein daggers were in use from the second half of the 15th century through the 16th century. You should be fine.

There is some minor discussion in this topic about this.

The shape of this one is clearly XVI th century. The overall look of a Swiss Dagger in the XVth century is more simple. Usually the handle is straighter and the "guard plates" thinner or plainer.

I have a couple of pictures at home on books, but they are fairly small and not very clear. I'll try to see what I can do with a scanner.

There are good examples of Swiss daggers of various size in the Osprey book : The Swiss at War 1300-1500. p23.

I found these two replicas of XVth century pieces, but I don' t know their sources:

http://www.armabohemia.cz/imgnew/epees/poignards/swissd.jpg

http://www.armabohemia.cz/imgnew/epees/epees/EP30v3.jpg

The first one seems, to my eyes, very similar to the Holbein dagger of the 16th century. I would like to find an original XVth century dagger of this shape as a real proof. Because my reenactment group is a fanatical group : )

Sadly, this form of a dagger was also used by Hilters SA (see picture below, taken from "Messer" by Pat Farey). The inscriptions were filed out after 1934.
It is a "little" off topic, but i thought it might be of interest.

About the real baselard you can find a short article in Wikipedia, even with two nice pictures of original finds. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baselard

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Pat Farey, Messer, Zürich 2004. Page117

Here is a picture of such a dagger from 1564, but this form of dagger was also used a century before so the date of 1475 should be ok.

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Picture taken from
Heinrich Müller: Albrecht Dürer, Waffen und Rüstungen. Mainz 2002, Page 44.