pike

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Landsknechte fighting with their spears (etching by Holbein)

A spear (also pike from French piquer 'stab') is a historical stabbing weapon for hunting and war purposes that, unlike the spear or throwing spear , is not thrown. The word lance is often used synonymously, but actually refers to the rider's spear.

history

The simple skewer is one of the oldest consciously manufactured weapons known to man. The ability to make and use a skewer has also been found in chimpanzees . Chimpanzees sharpen wooden sticks with their teeth and use them to poke the burrows of small mammals. It is therefore plausible to assume that the earliest humans also used tools and weapons made of wood. Compared to stone tools , wooden tools are much more exposed to weathering, so that there are hardly any archaeological finds from prehistory. While the oldest stone tools found are around 2.5 million years old, the oldest wooden tools found are significantly younger.

The oldest wooden find is a point from the English Clacton-on-Sea , which is interpreted as part of a skewer. It was excavated in 1911 and is estimated to be 450,000 years old. The fire-hardened tips from the Spanish Torralba and Ambrona, which are around 400,000 years old, are also interpreted in this sense.

In Lehringen, Lower Saxony, a 2.38 m long spear ( lance von Lehringen ) made of yew wood was found in the chest of a forest elephant skeleton , which dates back to 128,000 to 115,000 years BP and is ascribed to the Middle Paleolithic Neanderthals . Stone peaks from Kathu Pan , South Africa, have been dated to an age of around 500,000 years . The Homo heidelbergensis has it connected to a wooden stick and thus the first recorded geschäfteten created tools. These hunting rifles were more suitable for the thrust as they could only be thrown over a short distance.

Against a formation of cronies was difficult to arrive for Mounted

Humans developed the spit into a throwing spear (spear). This can be thrown, but can also be used to stab in close combat.

The use of the non-throwable skewer is documented as a long skewer in ancient times . The sarissa was the main weapon of the Macedonian phalanx in the 4th century BC. It was not until the late Middle Ages that its importance increased again. During the Scottish War of Independence , Scots developed the Schiltron , a combat formation with long spears. The Swiss developed the tactic of the force of violence and the pikemen as heavy infantry with pikes. Other European nations took over this, including the Landsknechte in the German Empire . Operating a pike was easy to learn, and a formation of spit-bearers (" cronies ") was able to defend itself very successfully against a cavalry attack . Spain perfected the interaction of pikemen and arquebuses in the Tercios (sp. Third); this order of battle was still used in European theaters of war until the Thirty Years' War .

The transition to firearms and in particular the introduction of the bayonet brought the end of this era.

nature

The wooden shaft was 5 to 6 meters long. The tip was made of different materials. The simplest was a pointed end, possibly fire-hardened. In the early days, natural materials such as bones or stone were used, later bronze or iron. The upper part of the wooden shaft could be reinforced with metal straps to prevent the tip from breaking off from the wood.

Derivatives, reception

  • The term philistine or philistine is derived from this for a person with conservative , bourgeois, equally narrow-minded views. This is because the spear (like the war flail , in contrast to the weapons of the nobility such as the lance and sword ) was an easy-to-manufacture weapon in the European Middle Ages , the individual parts of which consisted of cheap, abundant materials and those of citizens and peasants Revolts against the authorities was used. Examples are the Hussite (1419–1434) or Peasant Wars (1525).
  • The saying “learn something from the bottom up” has developed from the pikeman, since a soldier who was just recruited and was not able to bring in a firearm or a horse himself was equipped with a pike. The craft of war had to be learned "from scratch" for soldiers with no experience.
  • "Turning the tables" for suddenly reversing roles in a conflict comes from snatching and using the tables against the original owner after it has been turned.
  • Someone is - in a figurative sense - “piqued” if they are offended, injured or hit by a verbal attack.
  • German Armed Forces: In the Reichswehr , Wehrmacht , NVA and Bundeswehr , spit was or is the colloquial meaning for company sergeant (also "mother of the company" ).
See also:

Museum reception

In the Military History Museum in Vienna many original pikes from the 17th century are on display. There are also several figurines of imperial pikemen from the time of the Thirty Years War, which are also equipped with swords. In Graz Landeszeughaus , the largest surviving arsenal in the world, can also be seen from the 16th and 17th centuries, a large number of pikes.

See also

literature

  • Volker Schmidtchen: Warfare in the late Middle Ages. Technology, tactics, theory. VCH, Weinheim 1990, ISBN 3-527-17580-6 (also habilitation thesis at the University of Bochum 1984).
  • HW Koch: Illustrated history of military campaigns in the Middle Ages. (Original title: Medieval Warfare. Bison Books, London.) Bechtermünz, Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-8289-0321-5 , pp. 73, 131, 133, 149, 180–81, 188, 191, 197–98, 212, 231, 236, 244.

Web link

Wiktionary: skewer  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Weir: 50 Weapons That Changed Warfare , Career Press, 2005, ISBN 1564147568 , p. 10
  2. Rick Weiss: For First Time, Chimps Seen Making Weapons for Hunting in Washington Post from February 23, 2007 [1]
  3. ^ Paul R. Ehrlich , Anne H. Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment. Island Press, 2009, ISBN 1597264601 , page 72 [2]
  4. Natural History Museum : The Clacton Spear Archive Link ( Memento from October 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  5. Travis Rayne Pickering: Rough and Tumble: Aggression, Hunting, and Human Evolution , University of California Press, 2013, ISBN 0520955129 , page 91 [3]
  6. ^ Emil Hoffmann: Lexicon of the Stone Age , Verlag BoD - Books on Demand, 2012, ISBN 3844888985 , page 265 [4]
  7. Almut Bick: The Stone Age. Theiss-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8062-1996-8 , p. 65.
  8. Ker Than: Stone Spear Tips Surprisingly Old in National Geographic Society , November 16, 2012 [5]
  9. Bruce Bower: Oldest examples of hunting weapon uncovered in South Africa in Science News from November 15, 2012 Bruce Bower: Oldest examples of hunting weapon uncovered in South Africa - November 15, 2012 ( Memento from January 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Manfried Rauchsteiner , Manfred Litscher (Ed.): The Army History Museum in Vienna. Graz, Vienna 2000, p. 11.