European/West vs. Japanese/East (Samurai)

[Jumpy]

Cool! Will have to look out for them. So what are they in Latin? Codex Wallerstein sounds German.. Any idea what time-period they're from?

Didn't think there would be manuals still existing. As education and printing for the masses were not big back then, I expected all the combat training to be taught by word of mouth/practically rather than through a written manuals.

Usually they're in Italian and German, translated to English for your reading pleasure if you're lucky

 

[B0mbill0]

YouTube - The Last Samurai - Best Scene [Fall and rise again]

 

[VoodooPlata]

I have been to a few libraries in Europe to research it

You're letting this LARPer get off easy now! Which countries, which cities, which libraries, which manuscripts and in which language, man?

See, i strongly suspect that you made that up.

 

[Gurkha]

You're letting this LARPer get off easy now! Which countries, which cities, which libraries, which manuscripts and in which language, man?

See, i strongly suspect that you made that up.

:icon_chee Yeah! I am just not very inclined to call bullshit on someone even though I suspect that is exactly what it was.

I prefer to just take what I can use (he did tell me the names) and let the rest be.

 

[Jumpy]

yes it has full time athletes and not unathletic play acting nerds.

or rather, fighting for your life instead of touching an opponent with an epee.

i wasn't referring to LARP, dumbass.

 

[esotamoc]

or rather, fighting for your life instead of touching an opponent with an epee.

i wasn't referring to LARP, dumbass.

what were you referring to?

 

[esotamoc]

:icon_chee

Would you care to mention where and which manuals?

honestly, i cant remember.im too lazy to try to find out. i went to libraries in rome and paris. the medieval manuals were german and consisted of mainly grappling, holds, tripping and disarming. i remember that i was disappointed at the time because i really wanted to see swordfighting techniques like i imagined from the movies. this was more that 15 years ago and i was helping a friend with research for a thesis while in europe.

anyway- it s not such a big secret and if you do some research you will easily find the same kind of stuff. its there.

 

[ironbismark]

what were you referring to?

He was referring to larpers. He just believes the hype.

 

[esotamoc]

He was referring to larpers. He just believes the hype.

hehe

 

[SweetDaddySiki]

I'd like to add my 2 cents worth as a someone who is training in HEMA -Historic European Martial Arts

Firstly, I must dispel the myth of the heavy, blunt, crude european sword. European swords were as finely forged as any Japanese sword, and were often made with better steel. Take the longsword for instance. A longsword could be up 4 feet long, but weighed only slightly more than a Katana. The European one handed Arming sword, what people mistakenly call a 'broadsword' was often significantly lighter than a Katana.

Like all swords (including the Katana) they were sharpened to the level of a wood chisel, although they could, and sometimes were, honed to a razor sharpness.

Secondly, European swords were designed to cut flesh, not armour. Plate armour is not only very light (weighing in at about 65 pounds), it is also nearly impossible to cut with a sword. If you wanted to smash away at armour you used a polearm, a mace or a warhammer.

There were two main ways to use a longsword. The first way is blossfechten. Blossfechten is Bare Fighting, and was used against lightly armoured foes. This style is similar to everyones classic notions of how swordfighting is, with cuts, parries etc etc. Blossfechten was swift and deadly, with most fights over in a few exchanges.

YouTube - Zornhau training - Lichtenauers longsword techniques

The second way is Harnischfechten, Harness Fighting. Since plate is almost impossible to cut, you must pierce the weakspots. In order to do this the blade was grasped halfway down in length in a technique known as halfswording. The extra leverage and accuracy allowed the blade to stab into the seams of the armour. In addition the blade could be reversed and and the extending quillions of the hilt used like a mace to smash the face and the helmet. Harnischfecten was closely integrated with grappling, and fights often ended with daggers.

YouTube - SwArta Harnischfechten

There were also systems of battlegrappling known under the umbrella term Kampfringen, which translates to battle grappling. Grappling was closely integrated into weaponised combat.

YouTube - Hip Throw - Ringen am Schwert ("Wrestling at the Sword")
YouTube - ringschule Wroclaw
YouTube - Twirch Ringen (Updated)

We know a great deal about the fighting styles of the late medieval era because many of the fighting men wrote down what they knew in Fechtbuchs "FightBooks". These describe fighting techniques for everything from swords, to sickles, to clubs, to dueling shields, armed and unarmed. There are dozens known, with a concerted search underway to find more. The best known are Fiore Dei Liberi's Flos Duelletorum the Tower Manscript, which describes sword and buckler, the works of Talhoffer, Joachim Meyer, Liechtenauer and Paulus Hector Mair.

Since Mairs is the largest and finest illustrated, I'll link to it. The rest can be easily found with some googlefu.

Digitale Bibliothek - M

 

[esotamoc]

I'd like to add my 2 cents worth as a someone who is training in HEMA -Historic European Martial Arts

Firstly, I must dispel the myth of the heavy, blunt, crude european sword. European swords were as finely forged as any Japanese sword, and were often made with better steel. Take the longsword for instance. A longsword could be up 4 feet long, but weighed only slightly more than a Katana. The European one handed Arming sword, what people mistakenly call a 'broadsword' was often significantly lighter than a Katana.

Like all swords (including the Katana) they were sharpened to the level of a wood chisel, although they could, and sometimes were, honed to a razor sharpness.

Secondly, European swords were designed to cut flesh, not armour. Plate armour is not only very light (weighing in at about 65 pounds), it is also nearly impossible to cut with a sword. If you wanted to smash away at armour you used a polearm, a mace or a warhammer.

There were two main ways to use a longsword. The first way is blossfechten. Blossfechten is Bare Fighting, and was used against lightly armoured foes. This style is similar to everyones classic notions of how swordfighting is, with cuts, parries etc etc. Blossfechten was swift and deadly, with most fights over in a few exchanges.

YouTube - Zornhau training - Lichtenauers longsword techniques

The second way is Harnischfechten, Harness Fighting. Since plate is almost impossible to cut, you must pierce the weakspots. In order to do this the blade was grasped halfway down in length in a technique known as halfswording. The extra leverage and accuracy allowed the blade to stab into the seams of the armour. In addition the blade could be reversed and and the extending quillions of the hilt used like a mace to smash the face and the helmet. Harnischfecten was closely integrated with grappling, and fights often ended with daggers.

YouTube - SwArta Harnischfechten

There were also systems of battlegrappling known under the umbrella term Kampfringen, which translates to battle grappling. Grappling was closely integrated into weaponised combat.

YouTube - Hip Throw - Ringen am Schwert ("Wrestling at the Sword")
YouTube - ringschule Wroclaw
YouTube - Twirch Ringen (Updated)

We know a great deal about the fighting styles of the late medieval era because many of the fighting men wrote down what they knew in Fechtbuchs "FightBooks". These describe fighting techniques for everything from swords, to sickles, to clubs, to dueling shields, armed and unarmed. There are dozens known, with a concerted search underway to find more. The best known are Fiore Dei Liberi's Flos Duelletorum the Tower Manscript, which describes sword and buckler, the works of Talhoffer, Joachim Meyer, Liechtenauer and Paulus Hector Mair.

Since Mairs is the largest and finest illustrated, I'll link to it. The rest can be easily found with some googlefu.

Digitale Bibliothek - M

 

[Godhand13]

It's impossible to say who would win in a fight between a samurai and a knight, their fighting styles were totally different. Medieval knights relied on brute force and straight line speed to crush enemies into the ground, while samurai relied more on maneuvrability and agility. Their armour proves this. If you look at a European knight's armour, it was made to be virtually indestructible; but was very difficult to move in; which is why knights seldom fought on foot as their armour would have weighed them down and made them very vulnerable. Japanese armour on the other hand, was made of wood and lacquer as well as metal, and was much more flexible and light than the armour worn by knights, which was almost pure steel. As to their swords, a katana would probably be better quality, but knights carried several types of weapons, including maces, which would probably break the katana just as easily as it broke western swords.

 

[MarcusA]

Guy on the left would pwn both

 

[esotamoc]

It's impossible to say who would win in a fight between a samurai and a knight, their fighting styles were totally different. Medieval knights relied on brute force and straight line speed to crush enemies into the ground, while samurai relied more on maneuvrability and agility. Their armour proves this. If you look at a European knight's armour, it was made to be virtually indestructible; but was very difficult to move in; which is why knights seldom fought on foot as their armour would have weighed them down and made them very vulnerable. Japanese armour on the other hand, was made of wood and lacquer as well as metal, and was much more flexible and light than the armour worn by knights, which was almost pure steel. As to their swords, a katana would probably be better quality, but knights carried several types of weapons, including maces, which would probably break the katana just as easily as it broke western swords.

You don't know what youre talking about. European armour was fairly light and they had no problem grappling in it. European steel was superior to the metal used in japanese swords. Europoeans had better technology, bigger physically and more experience fighting against different nationalities.

 

[SweetDaddySiki]

It's impossible to say who would win in a fight between a samurai and a knight, their fighting styles were totally different. Medieval knights relied on brute force and straight line speed to crush enemies into the ground, while samurai relied more on maneuvrability and agility. Their armour proves this. If you look at a European knight's armour, it was made to be virtually indestructible; but was very difficult to move in; which is why knights seldom fought on foot as their armour would have weighed them down and made them very vulnerable. Japanese armour on the other hand, was made of wood and lacquer as well as metal, and was much more flexible and light than the armour worn by knights, which was almost pure steel.

This is a common misconception. European fighting styles had as much finesse as the Asian styles. The weapons weighed the same. Europe had the advantage of better steel and much more sophisticated smelting technology. This allowed them to manufacture high quality weapons without all the folding and processing techniques the Japanese were forced to use to control the carbon content of their poor steel.

Plate armour was not heavy, nor was it cumbersome. The armour weighed about 65 pounds, and the weight was evenly distributed around the body. In fact you can do cartwheels, aerobics and jump on and off a horse in it. By the time plate grew dominant, Knights mostly fought on foot using polearms, just like their late era samurai counterparts.


YouTube - Armour Aerobics
YouTube - Down from horseback with armour

Plate armour was actually lighter and less encumbering than many forms of Samurai armour, especially the classic O-Yoroi. European plate was made from hardened steel plate, and a system of straps distributed the weight around the body, making the armour much easier to move in and less fatiguing to wear.

Japanese armour could actually be quite heavy. It used alot of iron, as opposed to steel. The weight was often distributed on the shoulders, placing more strain on the wearer. The boxlike design of the earlier armours encumbered the arms. In addition, the rawhide stitching used to lace the armour together would absorb moisture from the humid air, swell up and increase the weight by several more pounds. It was not until much later that the Samurai switched to lamellar construction with better weight distribution and produced an armour that compared to plate in terms of encumbrance.

The japanese bought every last ounce of European armour they could get their hands on. If you look at Samurai armour from the late Sengoku period you can see the Japanese moving towards European style armour with such things as nanban-do Gosoku breastplates and Nanban kabuto helmets, based on european designs. If warfare had continued, you likely would have seen the abandonment of the Katana and the employment of longer, straighter blades as well.

 

[hughes fan]

The samurai were dangerous warriors and the samurai sword is the best sword in the world (statistically proven) so that kind of wraps it up.

 

[MarcusA]

The Medieval European Knight vs. The Feudal Japanese Samurai

Found this kinda interesting

 

[Godhand13]

Ok, I concede the point. But I do know for a fact that Japanese swords were better on average then European. I also know that Samurai DID rely on agility, as they were originally horse archers much like those of the middle east; and this role continued until very late in feudal Japan when the sword became the dominant weapon.

BTW, a legionary would PWN both because their armour and training was possibly the best in history...

 

[pmosiun]

If you guys went to japan and learn a traditional samurai sword style, kenjutsu. It really is not that impressive if you have experience "aliveness" in sport kendo because kenjutsu is often train using two man kata, you hit, i counter type kata.

 

[SweetDaddySiki]

Ok, I concede the point. But I do know for a fact that Japanese swords were better on average then European.

In what way? And which sword? There were many Japanese swords such as the straight edged tsurugi, to the tachi, the no dachi, the chokuto, and of course the katana. There were many, many European swords, forged in a bewildering variety of ways.

Assuming we are talking about the Katana and the longsword, how was it 'better' in an objective sense? Did it possess better metallurgy? No. Tamahagane steel was inferior to the best steels of Europe. Was it structurally better? No, laminated differentially hardened blades tend to be structurally weaker than through hardened monosteel like the medieval longsword. Was it sharper? Well, the edge of the Katana was made from a harder martensite than the steel found in European blades, so it could be honed to higher level of sharpness, but no sword intended for use in battle would ever be honed so sharp. The sharper the edge, the more easily damaged it becomes. Swords were chisel sharp. You only need to cut through flesh, and flesh and bone aren't hard to cut through. Was it faster or lighter? No. Katanas are actually quite heavy for their size.

That is not to say the Katana was somehow inferior, but the fact is, there is no 'best' sword. A sword that is optimal for some situations will be a poor choice for others. The Katana at its best was an elegant, beautifully made weapon capable of delivering horrific cuts. It was also a suboptimal thruster, expensive, rather fragile and lacked the versatility inherent in a weapon with two edges and extended quillions.