The halberd was a late medieval polearm combining an axe blade, thrusting spike, and hook-like rear projection.
The halberd is the great infantry polearm of the later Middle Ages: an axe blade, a rear hook or spike and a thrusting spike at the top, mounted on a shaft of roughly two metres.
It is the poleaxe adapted for massed infantry — longer, cheaper and made in quantity — and it gave foot soldiers a weapon that could genuinely deal with an armoured horseman.
It emerged with the Swiss in the fourteenth century and became one of the most widely used infantry weapons in Europe, staying in service for centuries after the medieval period ended.
The shaft runs 1.8 to 2.5 metres and the head combines three tools: a broad axe blade for cutting, a spike or beak on the reverse for hooking and punching, and a spike on top for thrusting.
The complete weapon usually weighs between 2.5 and 3.5 kilograms, with the mass concentrated at the head. That makes it slower than a poleaxe but far more damaging on a full swing, and the extra length is worth the trade in a formation.
Langets — iron straps running down from the head along the shaft — are standard, protecting the wood from being cut through and stopping the head loosening under repeated heavy impacts.
It was used in formation rather than individually, and its natural partner is the pike. Pikes hold an enemy at distance and halberdiers step in to do the killing where the pike wall meets the enemy.
Against cavalry it is devastating. The hook drags a rider from the saddle, the axe kills the horse, and the spike keeps the animal off in the meantime, so a body of halberdiers could break a charge that would ride down loose infantry.
The Swiss made their reputation with it during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Swiss infantry became the most sought-after mercenaries in Europe on the strength of what pike-and-halberd formations could do.
Its strength is doing several jobs at once for very little money. Cut, thrust and hook in one head, on a shaft any village could supply, meant a town militia could be armed to fight men-at-arms.
Its weakness is that it needs a formation and space to swing. A halberdier alone is at a serious disadvantage against a swordsman who can close inside the head, and in a crush the weapon cannot be used at all.
It also gives up reach to the pike. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that mattered increasingly, and the halberd's role narrowed to supporting the pike block rather than forming the main line.
It appears in the Swiss cantons in the fourteenth century, developing from the long-hafted axe and the agricultural billhook, and its early success is bound up with the emergence of Swiss infantry as a serious military force.
Through the fifteenth century it spreads across the Holy Roman Empire and beyond as Swiss and German mercenaries carry it, and the head becomes more elaborate — thinner blades, more pronounced beaks, decorated surfaces.
It remains in wide service into the seventeenth century, then follows the mace into ceremony, and it survives today in the guard formations that kept their historic equipment.
Swiss and South German forms are the classic type and set the standard for the whole of Europe, with a broad blade, a strong rear beak and a substantial top spike.
Italian workshops produced lighter, more decorated versions, some of them clearly parade equipment for guards rather than field weapons, and these are heavily represented in museum collections.
Related weapons shade into it at the edges — the voulge, the Lucerne hammer, the bardiche — and the boundaries between them are largely modern conveniences imposed on a continuum of local forms.