Knightly sword

The knightly sword, also called the arming sword, was the standard European fighting sword of the High Middle Ages: a straight, double-edged blade of roughly seventy to eighty centimeters carried on a single-handed, cross-shaped hilt and weighing about one to one and a half kilograms. It developed out of the earlier Carolingian sword around the tenth century and stayed in frontline use until about 1500, dominating from roughly 950 to 1300 when knights typically paired it with a shield or buckler. As two-handed longswords took over the main fighting role in the late medieval period, the arming sword settled into a secondary sidearm, and its line eventually fed into the cut-and-thrust swords of the Renaissance such as the rapier.