Swords are the iconic melee weapon, but they have rivals on the battlefield. On the medieval European battlefield, in fact, swords were made less and less effective by armor’s advances. Some heavier or stabbier swords still had viability against plate armor, but a set of weapons we’ll be looking at today, weapons long part of warfare, came to prominence. Indeed, these had been a standard part of military weaponry (and improvised weaponry) for at least as long as the sword. Axes, maces, spears, and other polearms are thoroughly dangerous and far from uncommon weapons in history; our characters, therefore, can both wield them and face them. Today, as is the intent of the series, we’ll be looking at how a man with a knife stacks up against an enemy with one of these- assuming, of course, that the armor involved is not enough to matter.

We have one thing to get out of the way. On the one hand, the weapons we’re covering today, in their developed forms, are military weapons. The sword is a weapon well designed for self defense and civilian carry, as most models are relatively convenient to carry and draw, compared to polearms in particular. They have too, in history, a sort of gentility to them; swords are the weapons of men of substance, of honor duels (admittedly, I am mostly versed in European history. I imagine this varies somewhat in other cultures). Axes, maces, spears, and polearms are not common-carry as weapons.

On the other hand, though, all four weapons can be replaced, with some loss of function, by fairly common tools. The tool-axe is differently weighted and edged than a battle axe, but it is still an axe, still a deadly weapon. A mace can be approximated by any large stick or hammer (indeed, when I speak of maces, I intend to cover all similar weapons, including war hammers).¹ A spear is any pole with a sharpened end. A polearm is anything long with a blade or a point or a weight on the end: a winnowing fork, a signpost with sign still attached, etc. Quarterstaffs too are not far from being polearms, once they get large enough. As we can see, analogous weapons are plentiful in history, particularly in agricultural occupations or in logging.

Let’s get into specifics.

Axes, Maces, and War-Hammers, Oh My

Think of these weapons as somewhere between sticks and swords, except they hit harder than any stick and harder than many swords. You cannot block a blow from one of these with a knife; you can only sort-of block them with an entire limb. A good axe blow may not get through your arm, but the arm won’t be usable a second time, and the same goes for war hammers and maces. The only saving grace is that being hit with the haft hurts  a lot less than being hit with the head; unarmed defenses against there boil down to ‘don’t, but it you have to, get in as close as possible.’ The same instruction goes for a knife fight.

None of these weapons, thankfully, is particularly useful in grappling range, where they lack the distance to build up speed and power behind a strike. That’s not to say they’re useless, but they’re not quite as good as a knife, even if they can still add weight to blows. Do remember that a chunk of metal hitting you in the side of the head is still a very bad thing, even if it isn’t moving fast enough to kill.

Like a stick, these weapons are fully capable of being used to disarm the knifeman, albeit (particularly with an axe or war-pick) the damage might be more of the ‘permanently down a hand’ than the ‘broken bones, wait a few months for repairs’ variety. That’s honestly less important than another difference: whereas the knifeman might be able to just push through the stick, particularly if he takes it on the right part of the body, he’s going to have a much harder time doing that with one of these weapons. If they hit, they cause immense amounts of damage, including knock-back.

A hit on the head, barring impressive head-gear, is a concussion, unconsciousness, or death. A hit on a shoulder or arm is the loss of that limb either to (if lucky) incredibly painful bruises or (more likely) to broken bones (from blunt impact) or severed muscle (axe). That’s not to say it’s always a one-hit kill, but it’s enough to stop all but the most desperate, most determined charge and give time for the second blow- which leads into the third, the fourth, and (if the knifeman isn’t dead yet) the fifth. You see where this goes.

So how does the knifeman win? He gets in close and stabs away. Generally speaking, this requires a combination of recklessness, obliviousness to danger, willingness to die, and calculated risk. The guy with the axe or club, of course, has the opposite goal: keep the knife away, in his ideal range. The character with the knife is at a massive disadvantage, though, because its easier to keep range with an axe than to reduce it without one.

Polearms!

Polearms are kings of the battlefield for a reason. Only the longest of swords can rival their reach and potential striking power, and those swords (often called zweihanders nowadays) were essentially polearms. A polearm is any weapon with a long haft, typically in excess of four feet, and includes the following: spears, pikes, bec de corbin pole-axes, halberds, glaives, billhooks, tridents, Hussite flails. Other weapons, such as Godendag, are borderline, and I’ve left several prominent members of the family out for brevity. The rule with these weapons is that they have more range than anything else in melee (six feet plus arm length, often).

Polearms hit like a truck. A halberd or a poleaxe is four to six feet of leverage with sharp metal on the end, and even plate armor may not be enough to quite stop it. Blocking a polearm with a knife isn’t happening unless the character is a superhuman or the polearm-user is remarkably weak and incompetent. The range of a polearm, however, is its weakness, not just its strength. Polearms lose much of their utility as soon as the enemy gets too close, and while maneuvering and fighting styles can account for this, the first choice of anybody with a shorter weapon, like an arming sword, is going to be to get past the danger zone, to move in close where the polearm is a less-optimized quarterstaff.

The win condition for the knifeman, then, is getting into extreme CQC, and he has two potential aids here. First, because of leverage and weight, polearms are typically not exceptionally fast. Spears can be an exception to this (spears have their own dynamic, emphasizing stab over slash, though most polearms and spears have some capacity for both). Don’t take this to mean it’s going to be easy to get in, though; a skilled polearm user can keep his weapon between him and his opponent with great reliability.

Second, polearms are not typically a duelist’s weapon. Polearms can be used as an individual, but due to their cumbersomeness most people prefer smaller weapons for civilian wear. Polearms come into their own on the battlefield, where they are wielded by thousands at once. Here, in the scrum of battle, the knife also has a place. The polearm may be the king of the battlefield, but the knife can still kill the king if the king doesn’t pay attention. What I mean is this: if the guy with the polearm is looking the other way or fighting somebody else, a knife is perfectly capable of killing him.

Even when his ideal range is lost, though, the guy with the polearm isn’t helpless. Very often, he’ll have a sidearm. Depending on era and price, in history this could vary from a dagger to a sword to a pistol, possibly all three. Any professional soldier is likely to keep a knife handy in combat; it’s an important fallback weapon, after all. Even non-professionals are going to have access to knives, just for the utility they provide out of combat. So if the knifeman closes range, he may find his foe has drawn his own knife or sword (or pistol), sometimes leaving his polearm in his off-hand, sometimes abandoning it entirely (usually a choice of necessity, not utility).

Polearms also become much more difficult to use in confined spaces, particularly when corners are involved. While the corridor can be turned to an advantage for the polearm by limiting the area he needs to offend to keep the knifeman away, they can also prevent him from reacting quickly enough to a new threat. Worse, they can lead to over-enthusiastic cuts or stabs getting the polearm stuck in something, a likely fatal mistake if the knifeman is quick-witted. This becomes a problem particularly when the guy with the polearm is inexperienced in wielding it in confined spaces due to his drills being exclusively in open ground.

Conclusion

Lots of weapons are more killy than a knife. Knives are short-ranged (throwing them is a dubious endeavor at best), low-impact, and messy. That short range, however, allows them unparalleled threat at fist-fight range. The name of the game for the knifeman, then, is closing distance and ending the fight fast. He has little to no defense, but if he can bring the knife’s offense to bear, that lack may not matter. While we haven’t gone into it in this series, the knife is a major threat to more thorough forms of armor, including the full plate armor of early modern Europe, as the range it comes into play at, combined with its small size, allows for exploiting unavoidable gaps in a way larger, longer-ranged weapons cannot reliably achieve.

God bless.

Written by Colson Potter

Footnotes

1 – They are similar enough for today’s purposes, and I don’t want to have to type and war hammers every time I use the word mace.