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'Swordbreaker' parrying dagger for catching and binding enemy swords, Italy, ~1600 AD
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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To be honest it looks like something that will easier break itself due to structural weaknesses being a part of the design. If I didn't google it I would think it's some sort of medieval meme (named swordbreaker because it breaks).
I have to assume it's thicker than the typical sword of the time, since that's the dimension that will be giving it strength if you catch a sword in one of the grooves and attempt to bend it. 1600 CE Italy is a time and place where rapiers were in common use, so it'd be going up against extremely long and thin swords. That said I'd assume that rather than breaking them in most instances, it would at best bend them. You don't want your sword to be made of the absolute hardest steel possible specifically because it will then break if you damage it, so maybe these daggers could also be tempered to be far harder (and more brittle) if you were in a position to not worry about the cost of breaking it
That makes sense. In my mind I saw this going against shortsword or lonsword.
It'd still work great there to provide a grab on their sword. Even large bastard swords aren't all THAT much metal for how big the blades are. The blade catcher would likely only need to be as thick as dumb heavy display swords to be stronger than a typical sword back then.
When you spread a select few lbs of steel over several feet of length, it gets pretty thin. Something like this doesn't have to be amazingly strong to still be stronger than any sword it'd meet. At least enough to catch and foul the blade without breaking.