A History of Weapons

by John O'Bryan

  EASE OF USE:

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 1100 CE

  BIRTHPLACE: Persia, Russia, Byzantine Empire

  ADVANTAGES: Can bust up armor like nobody’s business

  DISADVANTAGES: Somewhat heavy; not as quick as a longsword

  GIVES EDGE TO: Muhammad

  LANCE Everyone knows an infantryman with a spear can cause a lot of damage. If that foot soldier is properly trained and conditioned, his spear can skewer enemy torsos like a toothpick through a club sandwich. Now take that same weapon, bulk it up a bit, and put it in the hands of a horseman. That toothpick suddenly becomes much more powerful. Why? Because the horse is supplying the momentum—packing far more force than the thrust of an infantry spear. The ape on top of the horse has only to hold the lance in a “couched” position (locked under the arm) and aim it at its target. You would think this would be a cakewalk for the knight, but you’d be wrong. Lances were massive, and it could be a physical feat just to keep them up (insert dick joke here). Nonetheless, the lance would become one of the chief weapons of the Crusaders, who often found themselves attempting to run down mounted archers in Muslim lands. Exciting as it was, jousting eventually devolved into the tournaments of the later Middle Ages, which involved blunted lances that couldn’t puncture Saran Wrap. Boo, safety!

  EASE OF USE: (even though the horse does all the work, holding a lance steady is much harder than it looks)

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 300 BCE

  BIRTHPLACE: Ancient Iran

  EVOLVED FROM: Spear

  USED BY: Byzantine cavalry, Medieval European cavalry

  OTHER NAMES: Pike (when used by infantry), “pointy horsey stick”

  FUN FACT: In romantic literature, jousting represented sexual intercourse. Hot!

  GIVES EDGE TO: Jesus

  LONGSWORD Though not widely used until the end of the Crusades, the longsword became a true symbol of the movement to reclaim the Holy Land. The knights discovered that if they held the sword with the handle pointing up, it made a swell cross. But in addition to the convenient symbolism, the longsword was also a pretty effective weapon. As its name indicates, it had a substantial reach advantage over the pathetically named “short” sword, and it put on the length without becoming noticeably heavier. Though it had a simple design, the European longsword was a quick and graceful weapon, moving with speed and versatility, able to cut, thrust, stab, and parry circles around its heathen opponents. One can only assume the enemy was so dazzled by the cross-shaped longsword that he abandoned his false prophet and accepted Jesus as his savior. Over time, the longsword became even sleeker and more thrustable. Grooves called fullers were forged into the blade, making it even lighter. A sophisticated system of fencing was codified in the fourteenth century, and the sword was given a sharper tip to penetrate armor more easily. It then acquired the nickname “bastard sword.” This was partly because it was something in between a two-handed sword and a one-handed sword, and partly because its sword parents weren’t married.

  EASE OF USE: (Though light and manageable, the wielder must learn sophisticated techniques. Must also be Christian.)

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 1250 CE

  EVOLVED FROM: Roman gladius, Viking sword

  GIVES EDGE TO: Jesus

  SCIMITAR I know, I know. It’s a stereotype—Arabs riding around the desert with curvy swords trying to hack up sweaty, sunburned white people who obviously don’t belong there. But like it or not, by the end of the Crusades the Muslim armies were beginning to flirt with the scimitar—otherwise known as “that weird Middle Eastern sword they use in Aladdin.” Mind you, scimitar is an umbrella term that covers curved swords from all over Central Asia and the Middle East. In Persia, it was known as the shamshir. In India, it was tulwar. In Turkey, it was the kilij. All of them featured a curved blade (sometimes dramatically curved), and all of them freaked the fuck out of Westerners. The curved blade would become a symbol of the differences between the two armies of the Crusades. If the European longsword was the cross, then the scimitar might be the Islamic crescent. The scimitar was practical too, especially from horseback. Thanks to the curve of the blade, a mounted warrior could pull the sword through his victim more easily without it getting stuck, whereas the straight longsword tended to stick in the wound, increasing its chances of being dropped in battle. This is what made the scimitar the sultan of slashing in the weapon world.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 900 CE

  BIRTHPLACE: Persia or Central Asia

  REGIONAL VARIATIONS: Shamshir (Persia), kilij (Turkey), tulwar (western India/Pakistan), saif (Arabia)

  MADE FAMOUS BY: Arab stereotypes

  ADVANTAGES: Major slashing power, especially from horseback; won’t get stuck in its victim; if you rub it, a genie has to grant you wishes

  DISADVANTAGES: Not as versatile as a longsword; the genie is an asshole who always gives you exactly what you do not want

  GIVES EDGE TO: Muhammad

  TREBUCHET As fun as it probably was for Christians and Muslims to fight each other with melee weapons, the Crusades were really all about the big guns. The Christians built catapults, launched large chunks of rock at a Muslim city, and conquered it. Then the Muslims built their own catapults, hurled stuff back at the city, and reconquered it. It was a vicious cycle, and it was about to get even more vicious with the advent of the biggest rock-hurler of all: the counterweight trebuchet. Trebuchets were not new. They had been around since the fourth or fifth century BCE, when they were developed in China. But these old “traction trebuchets” required manpower to launch their artillery. They were decidedly lame, and will not be discussed further in this book. But once the trebuchet arrived in Arab and Byzantine lands, things got high-tech. A counterweight was added, providing a little more force for the launching mechanism. Then in the thirteenth century, the French blew everyone’s minds with the world’s first true counterweight (or “counterpoise”) trebuchet. This machine didn’t require a dozen sweaty dudes pulling on ropes to fire it. All it needed was gravity. The trebuchet could launch several hundred pounds of rocks at fortified structures, tearing through them like a Frenchman tears through frog legs. Counterweight trebuchets would get increasingly powerful, eventually able to launch a full ton of artillery at once. (That’s the equivalent of a Honda Civic flying at your castle.) The counterweight trebuchet had another advantage over old engines like the onager: It was easy to maintain. Torsion engines had to be fit together with precision-crafted gears and fittings, while the trebuchet was much more apt to be constructed on the fly. All you needed was a wooden lever, a sling, a counterweight, and a Honda Civic, and boom—so long, city walls.

  BIRTHPLACE: China, fifth century BCE (lame version); France, thirteenth century CE (awesome version)

  USED UNTIL: Fifteenth century, when it was made obsolete by firearms

  EVOLVED FROM: Mangonel, onager

  FAMOUS VICTIMS: Dover Castle, which was pounded by French trebuchets; the Song dynasty, which was defeated by Mongol trebuchets at the battle of Xiangyang

  ADVANTAGES: Relatively easy to build; very powerful; can be used to seize sacred lands

  DISADVANTAGES: Annihilates sacred lands in the process

  GIVES EDGE TO: Jesus and Muhammad

  OTHER KEY WEAPONS: Crossbow (Jesus), composite bow (Muhammad)

  HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE: Muhammad. (Come on, you’ve seen what happens to white people in the sun.)

  WINNER: Muhammad! The Muslims celebrate a decisive victory over the Christians, who have surely learned never to invade the Middle East ever again. And it just so happens that in the final battles of the Crusades, the Saracens get a little help from a Chinese invention called gunpowder . . .

  Chapter 8.

  ASIA

  BLOWS UP

  CHINA & MONGOLIA, 1000–1300 CE

  BEING ASIAN in the Middle Ages was probably both thrilling and terrifying. While the West was concerned with recapturing Jesus’ manger, the Chinese were making serious advancements in the science of blowing shit up.
Sometime around the ninth or tenth century ce, a team of Chinese alchemists was attempting to find an elixir for eternal life. Instead of making a life elixir, they blew themselves up in a massive laboratory explosion. They had accidentally learned the secrets of saltpeter, a critical component of the substance called gunpowder. A revolution in weaponry was about to begin. China was about to bring a gun to a knife fight.

  FIRE LANCES Sooner or later, somebody was bound to build something that combined the thrusting power of a spear with the hilarity of an ignited fart. That somebody was the Chinese, and the something was the fire lance—the world’s very first gun. It was little more than a bamboo tube filled with gunpowder and strapped to a spear. It had only one shot, and its range was poor, but anyone standing in front of an exploding fire lance would definitely know they’d been hit. Not only could the tube spew flames for a brief moment, it could be loaded with iron shrapnel or poison gas, giving the target even more to worry about. It’s unclear how effective this great-great-grandpa of the firearm was, though it was probably somewhere between a sparkler and a curling iron on the firepower scale, with most of the actual killing being done with the spearhead. On the other hand, the explosions of the fire lance certainly would have scared the enemy, who must have thought the Chinese had summoned the power of ancient fire demons to their bidding.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: Possibly as early as 900 CE

  IN WIDE USE BY: Twelfth century

  OTHER NAMES: Huo qiang (pear-flower spear)

  PRECURSOR TO: Fire tube (a more powerful version with a metal tube); cannon; handgun

  ADVANTAGES: Some physical damage; huge psychological effect

  DISADVANTAGES: Relatively weak firepower due to the bamboo tube; only fires one shot

  USER REVIEWS: “Why did someone ruin this perfectly good spear by strapping it to a sparkler?”

  ROCKET ARROWS The first gunpowder weapons were little more than arrows with a small packet of gunpowder strapped to them. A fuse was lit, the arrow was shot from a bow, and its target was set on fire by the exploding incendiary device. This invention, first used in 228 CE, marked a very mild beginning to a long, exciting history of bombs and firearms. Several centuries later, one of the emperor’s scientists thought outside the box: “Hey! I just realized something—what if we use the explosion to propel the arrow? It’ll make the arrow go a lot faster, and we can throw the bow away.” And that’s precisely how that shit went down. In 969, the Chinese generals Yue Yifang and Feng Jisheng used gunpowder to propel their arrows, culminating in the world’s first rocket launchers. These rockets became more powerful and elaborate, and by the fifteenth century, the Chinese and Koreans were using massive gunpowder-fueled contraptions that could fire hundreds of arrows at once. No straw hut was safe.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 969 CE

  INVENTED BY: Generals Yue Yifang and Feng Jisheng (who probably stole all the credit from their researchers)

  PRECURSOR TO: Korean hwacha, a mobile rocket arrow cart

  THE FIRST BOMBS Gunpowder in and of itself is not necessarily a weapon. If ignited, it instantly goes up in flames with no percussive blast. But as Jin-era Chinese chemists were discovering, if said gunpowder is packed into a tightly sealed iron container, it makes a “heavens-shaking thunder crash” that can scatter you limb from limb. You could try to throw these early grenades with your hand, but they were heavy, and there was always the risk that they would roll back to you and blow off your ass à la Wile E. Coyote. But it just so happened that in the mid-thirteenth century, the counterweight trebuchet (or “Muslim trebuchet,” as the Chinese knew it) had made its way to China. All of a sudden, the army of the Jurchen Jin dynasty could blow up enemy houses that were really far away. They could also pack the bomb with poison shrapnel to amplify the carnage. This was perfect for dealing with aggressive dicks like the Mongols, who were starting to step off the steppe and step up to the Chinese.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 1231

  DEVELOPED BY: Song and Jin dynasties

  MADE FAMOUS BY: Wile E. Coyote

  USED WITH: Trebuchet

  LANDMINES When you hear landmine, you probably think of that Metallica video with the crazy mute guy in the hospital bed. But did you know landmines were actually invented by the Chinese, way back in the thirteenth century? True story. The Song dynasty was deathly afraid of the emerging Mongol threat. (They were right to be afraid, too, since the Mongols would swoop in and conquer them in just a few years’ time.) A bright Chinese officer named Lou Qianxia came up with a solution: a big underground bomb that would blow the hooves right off the invading Mongol horses. The Chinese developed two types of trigger: (1) an “ambush” type, which relied on Chinese soldiers lying in wait and igniting the bomb just as the enemy was approaching the minefield, and (2) a more sophisticated mechanism that was triggered by enemy movement. In the latter version, an enemy’s foot would press on a plate, which released a pin, which caused a weight to fall into an underground trench. The falling weight would pull on a cord, which would spin a wheel, which would act as a flint, creating sparks that would ignite the bomb fuse. It was a lot like the game Mouse Trap, only it could blow your balls off.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 1277

  ADVANTAGES: Makes enemy more tentative; can be deadly if enemy happens to stand on the giant X

  DISADVANTAGE: Early fuses took a while to ignite

  PRECURSOR TO: Wheellock musket, which used the same flint-wheel firing system

  GENGHIS KHAN WILL STEAL YOUR SHIT AND KILL YOU WITH IT

  The Mongols were not an inventive people, per se. They didn’t create jaw-dropping technologies like the Chinese. They didn’t discover the path to enlightenment like the Hindus. They didn’t blaze the spice trail like Marco Polo. They didn’t accumulate a wealth of knowledge like the Arabs. And they kind of lifted their entire modus operandi from Attila the Hun. While everyone else was off creating, the Mongols were wandering aimlessly in Bumblefuckistan, eating meat and drinking horse blood. They didn’t even really have homes! One day, their leader Genghis Khan became so completely jealous of everyone else and their accomplishments that he decided to take a big massive dump on the entire earth. His Mongol horsemen began to stomp through neighboring countries, ruining everyone’s Sunday dim sum. Some people were able to use their technologies to keep the Mongols at bay, but not for long. Even if you could beat him, Genghis Khan was so stubbornly vindictive that he would eventually return and kick your ass. How did he manage to do it without knowledge and science? Easy. He captured the nerds who knew the science, and made them work for him. He’d use the landmines and bombs and trebuchets of other cultures against them, proving that while the Khan didn’t have much book smarts, he certainly had a strong appreciation of irony. With a pace that remains unmatched to this day, the Mongols seized almost all of Asia (except for Japan, where a tsunami beat them down) and most of Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan enjoyed the spoils, too. He did so much fornicating that an estimated 8 percent of everyone living in the former Mongol Empire is descended from his seed (roughly .5 percent of the entire world!). But the Mongol Empire didn’t last long. Just like Sid Vicious, they were destined to die by their ferocious live fast/die young approach. Their hegemony began to crumble, leaving them with nothing but thousands of horses. With the magic of their empire gone, the Mongols returned to being crazy homeless people with too many pets.

  ZHANMADAO Suffice it to say there was no PETA in Song-era China. That’s why they could develop the zhanmadao—a seriously cruel invention whose name literally means “horse-chopping saber.” Even though eleventh-century China was loaded with explosives, it still felt the need for traditional weapons to use once the smoke had cleared. The zhanmadao wasn’t complicated; it was basically just a big-ass sword that had evolved from previous large blades. You didn’t need to be particularly skillful to use it—just grip it with both hands and hack. But you did have to have balls, as the zhanmadao required its wielder to crouch and wait for horses to rumble toward him in an ominous cloud of thund
ering death. At the last moment, if the warrior hadn’t been trampled to death by the approaching cavalry, he would swing the zhanmadao and take one or two legs from the enemy’s horses. After the horse collapsed, the zhanmadao wielder would then turn his horse chopper on the rider, who would be lying battered and dazed somewhere nearby. It was a brutal end for both horse and rider, but is it really anything you didn’t read in My Friend Flicka?

  DATE OF ORIGIN: No later than 1072

  FAMOUS VICTIMS: Mongol horses, Jin dynasty cavalry

  EVOLVED FROM: Dao

  USER REVIEWS: “Did you see me?! I totally just cut that horse in two!”

  Chapter 9.

  JAPANESE BEEF:

  SAMURAI VS. NINJA

  800 CE–1700

  IF YOU THOUGHT the Yankees and Red Sox had the greatest rivalry in history, you really need to read up on the martial history of Japan. The samurai and the ninja—two of the world’s most recognizable warriors—were both born from the chaos of Japan’s feudal era. And they could both kill the fuck out of the entire Yankee and Red Sox active roster. These vastly different warriors from two diametrically opposed social classes would clash physically and politically over the centuries. They would create a long-standing beef that would make baseball look like . . . well, baseball.