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i'v never had luck with anorexic tangs. Personally, i temper the whole thing from end to end with a full-length, almost grip width tang, copper pin my grip slabs on, spin the thing into a spiral with a file, then wrap and sew into rayskin. Not exactly "historically accurate" but i'v never had one break

At the risk of stating the obvious: doesn't the cross-guard usually (almost always?) enclose the juncture between the blade and tang? And rather snugly at that? Sure, if one were trying to simply snap off or even just bend the tang on a blade blank, that really wouldn't take too much force with how thin most tangs are - regardless of how excellent the heat treatment was. But with the typical European cross fitted over that juncture(or even something as "insubstantial" as a Scandinavian or Roman type guard), you're no longer talking about creating stress in that juncture alone; in order to cause failure there you'd have to create enough force to do the same to the surrounding guard as a whole, which would be pretty much impossible using just human muscle... And in cases with tangs made of softer material to avoid breakage, bending is made more difficult by the grip itself, in either its material, thickness, or both.

I've had one sword break on me at the tang/blade intersection. This blade had a fairly wide tang that looked sturdy, but intersected with sharp corners and probably not annealed at all but the same hadness as the rest of the blade. The corners are where the stress concentrates and it's where the break occurred during a hard cut. Hiltless pointy blades are no fun flying around, I can tell you that much. In that case a well supporting crosspiece and the rest of the hilt didn't help enough.

That sword is now retired and re-ground into a shorter seax with a wide tang and well rounded intersection corners. Actually turned into a pretty decent short cutter after all, though it'll never really look right for a seax with its' broad sword fuller.