← Back to the front page

Facts from the Middle Ages that Are Full of Surprises

Khalid Elhassan March 15, 2021 36 min

20. The Medieval Knights’ Sword

The sword most often used by medieval knights, aptly named the knightly sword, was double-edged and straight, with a blade that usually measured between 28 to 32 inches. Some had blades of up to 39 inches. Whatever its length, it featured a single-handed cruciform hilt that gave it a distinct cross shape. It was prevalent as the main European sword from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. Then it was edged out by the longsword, and was relegated to the role of a secondary weapon or sidearm.

The relegation to sidearm earned the knightly sword another name, the “arming sword”. It traced its roots to an earlier Viking sword, which in turn traced back to an even earlier sword, the Roman spatha. Those earlier swords lacked a key distinguishing feature of the knightly sword: the cross guard that made the latter resemble a cross. The transition from the Viking sword to the knightly sword went through an intermediate phase of the Norman sword in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.