The FORGOTTEN & SECRET Advantages of CURVED SWORDS?

let's look at five advantages of extremely curved swords that you might not have thought of hey folks Mattis here scholar Gladiator so I've just got this awesome new sham share from LK Chen which I've got to say is absolutely gorgeous obviously there'll be a review of this coming in due course but having such a curved blade obviously I've got antique sham and stuff but having a sharp one that I can actually use and cut things with yes you will be seeing that very very soon um has given me a lot of thoughts about curved blades and now a lot of you I've done a lot of videos in the past about curved versus straight blades and a lot of you will be Vaguely Familiar with the basic advantages of straight blades and curved blades but there are some more subtle advantages to extremely curved blades like this not just slightly curved but really curved there's some advantages to really curved blades that I think are commonly overlooked and deserve some attention so let's look at my five most surprising or unexpected or uh neglected should we say reasons why curved blades can be advantageous in certain ways but before we go into that a very quick word for our amazing sponsors for this video who are M Globes with a special offer for you so this video today is sponsored by mg Globes brilliant offer down below now I love M Globes I've actually had one for quite a while and they make absolutely awesome presents I can promise you everyone who comes around to my house wants to pick up mova globe and play with it if you're wondering how they work they seem to magically rotate inside they're powered by light so so long as you've got UV light they don't require any electricity or any charging or anything like that they simply sit there under natural light and they rotate really really calmly and relaxingly as you can see here you can pick them up and they float around inside the ball it's quite mesmerizing there we go um and of course you can get a variety of different stands so 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curved swords are often if not always they're often associated with people that used Cavalry extensively as we find in the Middle East um across the arab-speaking countries and so on so forth now this is a shamere that means it's modeled on a Persian style of Sword the word shamire is Persian now one way that these were used on Horseback is not how most people think of most of you are familiar with the slashing from various angles and draw cutting across but there's one very important way these were used on Horseback that most people don't know about and that's to thrust but not to thrust that's not to say you can't thrust with these you can you have to invert the blade but there's a type of thrust that was done with these very curved blades that people often don't know about and it's described in 19th century British sources so really useful um benefit there of sort of Victorian expansionism was they described how people fought in other areas not always accurately but sometimes now uh one of the ways this was used on Horseback was imagine you're Galloping Along on your horse hit and your opponent's over there they're coming towards you maybe their swords up ready to give you a slash across here one thing you can do which gains maximum reach is to extend your arm out here okay so just like you were giving a Thrust with a straight sword but of course this is an extremely curved sword and the sword although you could technically do this with a slightly curved or even possibly if you did it the right way with a straight sword this is much easier with this type of very curved blade and instead of putting the point into the opponent you essentially hit them with the tip of the blade here that means that you're thrusting with the edge you get that because it's a very curved blade so you thrust with the edge into them and you hit them here so you're hitting them with the same type of reach with an arm extension and near the tip as you would do with a Thrust so it's got the reach Advantage as much as you can get with this type of Blade so you're hitting them far out here you hit them with the front of the edge and as you uh go into and pass them their body or whatever bit of them youve hit will slide down the blade this way and as you go past you change the angle here and you go round so you never get your blade stuck in the person with a straight blade the point goes in and you have to do a tent pegging like movement to extract it out as you go past so the same thing with the Lance the point goes in and as you go past you've got to do this with the arm and it requires quite a bit of training actually not to say this doesn't require training but in many ways it's less of a problem because the blade doesn't enter their body with the tip it does it's not going to get stuck um so you don't have to extract it so much you more stroke across the target so you essentially extend the arm push the blade into the target slides across and you pass around and another Advantage is having done this imagine there's motion now as you come in you hit them here you draw the blade across there so that's one wound and now your blade automatically has momentum to come around with a cut on the way out as well so you can essentially thrust them with the edge and cut them as they go past as well so there's the first somewhat surprising advantage of a very curved blade now the next Advantage is in very close in combat this could be oneon-one because you're in a combined space it could be because someone's trying to Grapple with you it could be in a mass melee it could be in a battlefield it could be uh in a jungle or a forest or wherever inside a building but the fact is these very curved blades are less likely to get snagged and stuck because they can move circularly and keep moving around without having a long extension here you can draw the blade easily across and past and through the target really really close to the body because they are so curved they are the curve of the circle with that which that motion assumes with a straight blade yeah you've got more reach but the problem is in a close in environment okay without switching to half sword or using parts of your Hilt which is exactly what Europeans did with straight blades but if you're holding it conventionally a straight blade is more likely to get caught up and snagged and it's more difficult to extract in close distance than a curved blade is and in fact we do even find that there are some half sing techniques found in Persian and um other Middle Eastern martial arts and potentially in Indian martial arts as well though um I'm I'm not explicitly aware of that but I'm sure they do exist um in the same way that we find forms of half sing even in Japanese martial arts with a katana as well so the fact is with a curved blade uh even without doing that you can prevent the blade from getting snagged and stuck in very very close distance so you can cut and there's even an exercise I've talked about this in a previous video there's even an even an exercise that we know is practiced in the mise whereby you would place your knee against a tree or a wall and practice giving your cuts at this type of distance um in other words a drawing cut very very close so there's your second Advantage they can be used continuous motion really really close to the body which is really good against grappling or in a close pressed in situation now something that often gets neglected when we're talking about curb swords is the Scabbard and the way it's worn now one of the peculiarities of a very curved sword like this um whether it's worn um Point down or War worn horizontally is that because of the curvature the tip comes up and away from the ground and away from your leg this means that whether you're um on Horseback or whether you're on foot that tip of that sword is less of a problem at getting tangled into things now for anyone who's walked around for a day in a reenactment or uh even uh like LARP or um even a heor event maybe wearing a sword you will know that long straight blades are a pain in the butt sometimes literally sometimes as someone else's butt because they are long straight lines whether you if you wear them Point downwards and for example you have to crouch to pick something up the point jams into the ground so you have to remember to tilt it when you tilt it it hits someone behind you in the shin or even worse um when you're if you're wearing it at an angle like this it's easier to draw and it's less likely to get stuck on the ground but then you have a great big tip waving around behind you this was so much a problem that as rapers got longer they had to devise ways of slinging them quite low so that you could get such a long blade out of the Scabbard but additionally there were even edicts given about the length of Blade because they were causing an inconvenience at court um and uh you know Japanese swords were worn uh certainly Katana were worn edge up and worn quite High uh but it was considered uh very rude if you bashed someone else with your Scabbard the fact is that all over the world whenever people have worn swords where ability and convenience is a major factor CU remember these spend way more percentage of their existence being worn than actually being held in the hand or used in a fight so the way that the convenience of wearing these is incredibly important so there we go third point is that the point being such a curved blade it occupies less uh horizontal space or vertical space depending which direction it's pointing in and because it's curved up it's less likely to be a problem for your feet or the ground and if you're riding on a horse it's less likely to be a problem even for your stups or the flank of the horse or things like that um so quite simply in many ways these are more convenient and easier to wear so the fourth point is something that often gets neglected with very curved swords and that is thrusting but not the thrusting you're thinking about so I think most of you will be aware of the fact that with a curved blade it's more difficult to do a traditional straight thrust that you would do with a straight blade generally speaking straight blades if you want to predominantly thrusting fight style straight blades are the way to go they generate more Force into the Target because there's a straight line behind the point um and you got better blade occupation of the space in front of you while you give point so you know rapers and small swords and uh side swords and long swords are generally better generally speaking better thrusting weapons however these weapons can thrust in various ways and one of the ways that most people know about is that they can come around an opponent's sword okay because of the curved blade if you give a cut here and a person parries you can flip the sword round and thrust me's I think most people are aware of that but there's another type of thrusting which often gets neglected so I'm going to grab something as an exaggerated example for a second and that is the Roman scotum here now if we go back to the age of the uh Gladiators the gladiatorial games there was a type of curd sword called a seeka used by the thian and it is thought that this was particularly good at getting around the opponent's Shield which a straight blade although straight blade can get around it can't do it so easily now in all places where these curved swords were used various types of Shield I just grab one over here various types of uh usually circular but not always um Shield were used in India in Persia in the Middle East North Africa these types of shields were often used sometimes they were fairly large like this sometimes they were smaller bucklers but the fact is that with a curve blade you stand a better chance of if youve come in here and a person's covered with their Shield of flipping it around and thrusting around the back of their Shield so quite simple point with a curved blade you're more able to thrust round Shields and given that these exist as a unit with shields and bucklers in all of the places these very curved blades was used Shields and bucklers were also extremely normal and prevalent and pretty much Universal so therefore the ability to thrust around those becomes a really important thing so the fifth and final advantage of a subtle or lesser known advantage of very curve blades is in a nutshell being easier to thrust the opponent in the hand what do I mean by that so uh in a world where people are giving Cuts with weapons like this one of the problems with thrusting in the hand is that with a straight blade if you place your weapon and your hand in a straight line which is gives the greatest reach and the g greatest penetration and generally speaking is a good thing but if a person's cutting at you and you thrust at their hand there is always the risk that their hand will get stabbed but the momentum of their blade will still carry on down and hit you in the hand anyway and it's one of the problems if we just grab another straight blade here completely different type but two straight blades it is one of the problems always when two straight blades point at each other's hands what you often get is a double hand now later on we get things like this Rapier guard which prevent that from being a b big problem but when we're in the world of simple medieval cross guards or Messa hilts or uh shamire hilts the hand is quite exposed and anytime that the two blades become completely parallel for whatever reason whatever you do to offend the opponent's hand is often going to bring your own hand at risk however if we have a shamere if we were to cut at the hands the straight s sword would always win because the blade is bending upwards away from the hand okay however if we flip that around the reverse now becomes true what it does is it lifts my hand further away from the straight blade and brings the point very close to the opponent's hand this can be applied from from a number of different angles it could be applied downwards but more usually perhaps applied from the side okay by applying a Thrust to the incoming attack with if whether they've got a straight blade or curve blade doesn't make any difference by applying the point into their hand here my hand is far away I can do the same from this side I can do the same from below and as mentioned I could do the same from above but generally speaking cuts are moving uh across wordss or downwards sometimes they're moving upwards in which case you could do that um but the point is that because of the curve by applying the thrust the opponent's hand here your hand is further away from the line of their sword so therefore it's safer than with a straight sword so there we go five hopefully unexpected advantages of a really really curved sword like this LK Chen uh shamire here which is really lovely and I haven't cut anything with it yet but it's super sharp and I'm really looking forward to getting going on some uh bottles and other targets with it so uh thanks a lot for watching I hope those five at least some of them have been surprising thought-provoking inspiring whatever to you I hope it's been interesting that's the main thing and I hope I'll see you back on the Channel really really soon check out all the links below cuz some of them might be interesting to you and uh I hope I see you again soon take care and I have been Matt Easton and I will continue to be cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our Facebook a like And subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 121,561

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Id: X74wKh8B7z0

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023