[Michael Wiethop]

Reading Romance of Three Kingdoms lately got me thinking about East Asian polearms. For the purposes of this post, I'm not including spears as polearms (even though that's what they are); I'm talking in general about halberds, halberd-like weapons, glaives, and the other bewildering amount of names for these sorts of things. There were quite a few types of polearm in East Asia, but what strikes me about them is that in China, they were used since the Shang Dynasty in the second millennium BC, and that the Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps the Mongols all extensively used weapons similar to halberds with both hands on horseback. But in Europe, if I'm not mistaken, polearms didn't catch on until probably the fourteenth or fifteenth century AD.

Likewise, javelins were very widespread in most of Europe for thousands of years. Yet despite their effectiveness, they don't seem to have been used much if at all in China, Korea, or Japan.

Very often on this forum I see phrases to the effect that "if it were any good, people would have used it." But both javelins and polearms were useful in Europe and Asia. In most of East Asia, the bow (or sometimes the crossbow in China) was the premier ranged weapon until it was slowly replaced with firearms. You might say that East Asian warriors didn't use javelins because they were outranged by bows; why, then, did the Greeks once have many ancient heroes who were archers (Herakles, Philoctetes, and Odysseus, for example), only to later shun bows as cowardly weapons and focus on javelins? Why did it take thousands of years for Europeans to develop weapons similar in function to the ge and ji, and why did they never seem to use such weapons from horseback?

[Mike Ruhala]

In Europe the Dane axe occupied the niche that would later be associated with the halberd. In fact central European artwork shows proto-halberds that were essentially a Dane axe whose shaft protruded through its eye and was fitted with a spearhead. Ignoring the construction method the silhouette of the weapon looks startlingly like a 15th/16th century halberd.

[Mario M.]

Europeans really, really loved shields for a really, really long time.

That's pretty much it.

[Pieter B.]

[Timo Nieminen]

[Philip Dyer]

[Michael Wiethop]

I suppose if the Chinese were better able to produce large quantities of armor than contemporary Europeans, shields would not seem so necessary. Most of the terracotta warriors have armor, for example, so if I'm not mistaken, lamellar, or something like it, was very common even back in the Qin Dynasty. Contemporary Europeans seem not to have that much mass-produced armor, except perhaps linothoraces, so shields would have made sense. I wonder, though, why armor was mass-produced in China but not as much in most contemporary European societies.

[Philip Dyer]

[Lafayette C Curtis]

[Timo Nieminen]