Javelins and throwing spears gave medieval fighters a short-range missile option before close combat.
The javelin is the thrown spear: lighter and shorter than a fighting spear, carried in numbers, and used to break up an enemy formation before contact rather than to decide a fight by itself.
It belongs to skirmishing warfare — raids, ambushes, frontier fighting and the opening stages of a battle — and to armies that valued mobility over the weight of a formed line.
It never dominated European warfare the way the spear and the bow did, but it persisted for centuries in exactly the places where its qualities mattered, above all Iberia and the Mediterranean.
A javelin typically runs 1.2 to 1.8 metres and weighs well under a kilogram — perhaps 400 to 800 grams — because everything about it is subordinated to how far and how accurately it can be thrown.
Heads are small and narrow, since a thrown weapon carries little energy and needs to concentrate what it has. Many are barbed so they cannot be pulled free and thrown back.
Some forms use a long, soft iron shank behind the head, so the weapon bends on impact and is useless to the enemy — the principle of the Roman pilum, which persisted in the Frankish angon of the early medieval period.
Javelins were thrown in volleys at short range, generally under thirty metres, immediately before contact. The aim is disruption: men flinching, shields raised, the line losing its dressing at the moment it most needs to hold.
Against shields the effect can be mechanical rather than lethal. A javelin lodged in a shield makes it heavy and awkward, and a man who has to discard his shield in the front rank is effectively disarmed.
Light cavalry used them extensively for harassment, riding within range, throwing, and withdrawing before contact — a technique that dominated Iberian frontier warfare and much of the fighting around the Mediterranean.
Its strengths are speed, cheapness and the ability to hurt an enemy before he can reach you. A man can carry several, throw them quickly, and then fight with something else.
Its weaknesses are range and power. A javelin is outranged decisively by any serious bow and delivers far less energy on arrival, so against well-armoured opponents it accomplishes little.
Ammunition is the practical limit. A skirmisher carries perhaps three to six, and once they are thrown he is finished as a missile troop and must either withdraw or fight with a sidearm.
Early medieval Europe inherited the thrown spear from the Roman world, and the Frankish angon — a barbed, long-shanked javelin of the sixth and seventh centuries — is its clearest early descendant.
Through the high Middle Ages it retreats in northern Europe as the bow and then the crossbow take over the missile role more effectively, and by the thirteenth century it is marginal in most Western armies.
It survived vigorously in Iberia, where the jinete light cavalry of the later Middle Ages used javelins as a central part of their tactics, and in the Mediterranean and Balkan warfare where similar conditions applied.
Iberian practice is the most developed. The jinetes rode light, threw javelins and avoided contact, and their tactics were shaped by centuries of frontier warfare where raiding mattered more than pitched battle.
Frankish and Germanic forms of the early medieval period are heavier and closer to a thrown fighting spear, and the angon in particular is built to disable a shield rather than to kill at range.
Byzantine and Balkan armies used javelin-armed light infantry throughout the period, and the technique passed back and forth across the frontier with the peoples who practised it on both sides.