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It seems almost too recursive to break a months-long Barbelith absence to correct Dead Megatron, but...
What you don't know, Neon, is that fencing started not as a sport, but as a fighting style made to bypass the protection of the medieval armor. You see, when the other guy has a full body armor, swiging a heavy two-handed sowrd around in an attempt to slash him is pretty much a waste of time. But if you instead have a thin, long blade with a very sharp point, you can stab the other guy through weak points in his armor, such as under the arm, the groin, the neck and whatnot, thus, together with the long bow, making the whole concept of heavy armor fully obsolete, and replacing the medieval knight with the duelist, like the Three Musketeers of the Renaissance.
Clue's in the question. They are called Musketeers because they have muskets - although those specific three musketeers were kicking around in the mid-17th Century, when nobody had worn full plate for a long time and the Renaissance was pretty much done. Gunpowder weapons, not light swords, were the thing that made heavy armour obsolete. Pre-gunpowder and post-mail, you were better off in hand-to-hand combat using a mace or an axe, which could break limbs through armour. There were swords designed to pierce mail armour, and they had no cutting edge - the tuck family - but they were much heavier, stiffer and generally longer than the duelling weapons that developed into the weapons used for fencing as we understand it. Generally, it's a bad idea to move within the arc of an armoured opponent's spadone in order to hope you can ping away and find a weak spot in his armour when your entire body is _unarmoured_ and thus an open target. All the stuff about quick, clean deaths is wrong but romantic.
Other notes: "fencing" can describe any form of combat with hand-held weapons, although it is usually restricted to bladed weapons - the swords we generally think of as used in fencing are used in sport fencing or Olympic fencing. And the epee in sport fencing does not have an effective edge - only hits with the point count. Otherwise, I think everything above is accurate. |
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