Why was the Swiss Pike a revolution? It just seems to be using ancient Greek fighting style...

Why was the Swiss Pike a revolution? It just seems to be using ancient Greek fighting style. It's very similar to the Sarissa.

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No but professional Armies were.

It was revolutionary because it countered armored, mounted knights. Prior to pikes there was no easy/simple counter to heavily armored horsemen deciding the battle. Pikes also hadnt been used commonly since antiquity. An event doesnt have to be new in order to be revolutionary. For example, Rome was a Republic, when the US became a republic many considered this "revolutionary" despite not being a new idea.

>very similar to sarissa
>no shields

The Swis were hardcore because unlike other pike armies, they actually closed with the enemy and fought in hand-to-hand. Pikemen were traditionally just levies or part-time soldiers, their chief use was to protect archers and later musketmen, they weren't generally intended to do the heavy lifting of winning a battle. The Swiss had professional soldiers who were strongly motivated to fight to preserve their freedoms, this made them tremendously effective against the poorly-motivated pikemen of their enemies, who would often just rout if forced into actual combat.

I may be wrong in saying this, but ancient Greek/Roman strategy and innovations had largely been forgotten until the renaissance came along with its hard on for Greece/Rome, so it was this revisiting of Greek pike strategy that gave birth to the Swiss pike formations

It's not really that they'd been forgotten, but that they were difficult to impossible to implement what with a very different demographic and social system.


A state whose armed force depends on either a citizen's militia or a professional standing army isn't going to mesh well with a feudal system of land and thus economic ownership.

It's actually not a surprise that pikes started to make a name for themselves again where you had less of a agricultural feudal mode than was common in the rest of Europe. (Not that I mean to say that there were no wealthy landowners in Switzerland or that pikes were unused elsewhere)

>so it was this revisiting of Greek pike strategy that gave birth to the Swiss pike formations
>no roman short sword + great shield formations

Even in the old days, people were scared if ballin' too hard

The Swiss used the pike as well as the halberd as their main weapons. What made them unique was that they managed to move large, closed formations with good speed over the battlefield. This was unknown at the time. for large bodies of infantry.
The pikes where able to hold of all cavalry and the halberds where preferred for direct combat.
>its maneuvering

>Why was the Swiss Pike a revolution?
Because of the pikemen being professionally trained and mixed with musketeers.

That came 200 years later. They started as Amateurs with some crossbows.

How exactly did this work? How did halberdiers enter the fray?

Not him, but my speculation=pikes keep horsemen at bay, the halberds that are interspersed among the pikes chop down on infantry trying to get through the pikes towards the men. Some states also mixed great swords/zweihanders/ claymores (whatever u want to call them) among pike formations to parry other pikes and provide close(r) quarter combat ability.

To add on to this, individual pikemen are fucking useless. You need to purchase the services of the whole regiment.

Pikes form alleys trough which the halberdiers can attack.

Why are they so lightly armored? Did they actually march against other pike formations with only their codpiece to protect them?

Characteristic Swiss precision engineering

That's pretty damn interesting. It must have taken a huge amount of training and discipline, though, it isn't a simple maneuver on that scale. Did it work well? Do you have some sources on that (brevity is preferred)?

Yeah, I was aware of that.The thing that bothers me about that is that mixing anything into a row of pikes would create weakpoints (by making holes in the pike wall), and seems like a bad idea for that reason. Besides, the illustration shows pure halberdier ranks behind pure pike ranks.

That varied hugely across the centuries. Often though, if a guy was unarmored or lightly armored, he was towards the rear; the guys in front who were expected to take more abuse tended to wear heavy armor.

Actually it didn't take that much of training, they just formed alleys on command and the other guys went trough the breach. likely they just pushed them to the side on command.
A typical Swiss formation consisted of up to 7000 men in one phalanx, so called Gewalthaufen. 2-3 of those formed an army. There where also some crossbows, early arquebus and few cavalry, mostly for scouting and messenger duty.
As a rule of thumb, richer folks and city folks that could afford suits of armour and some standardized gear went for the pikes. The poorer folks and country bumps did with less armour, mostly just an iron hat and what else they could muster and a halberd or equivalent instead.

Old Swiss army organization was based on cantons, which in turn where divided into cities, valleys, towns, church parishes and what else. Common was that the fighting men formed a warband called a Fahnen (flag) an voted their captains and sergeants. The captains of all the Fahnen then did choose their leaders in turn. Which is why you likely wont hear much about famous Swiss generals, most battles had joint commands of the cantonal leaders.

Military was somewhat mandatory, you where not considered honorable in society if you didn't serve in some way. Also, adventure and plunder was a major motivation for the folks back then.

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Bless your heart, user.

Also note, before the Germans turned it full gay mode, Feathers on the hat/helmet indicated command functions, so did colorful headbands and matching suits of clothing. Clothes in the color of a canton / city was a high honor and the right to wear them was awarded like a badge.

>>no roman short sword + great shield formations
Spaniards tried re-introducing sword&buckler men, albeit in the context of a Pike and Shot formation. They weren't too successful.

>Prior to pikes there was no easy/simple counter to heavily armored horsemen deciding the battle.
Massed heavy infantry was already doing this. The hundred years war is basically the tale of kingdoms learning to centralize and armies learning that GOOD infantry doesn't care much about cavalry.

Nothing you said is correct.

So they could look fabbulous.

manly men in fabulous fashion must be cyclical.

>Nothing you said is correct.

Except for literally all of it you mean?

>no Kanton Schwyz

Disgusting

what the hell, that pike has to be like 15 feet tall

That's a big pike

The Swiss were not the first pre-modern dudes that used pikes, the Frisians had been using it since the 1250's.

They used them to jump over canals and ditches

dude, the roman sword and great shield formation is used by all police forced in the planet TODAY when they have to break demonstrations.

>Nothing you said is correct.
Yeah he said some correct things.
A notable part of the swiss pike square was the charge.

They found a way to roll over an opposing infantry formation on flat ground and managed to repel cavalry while doing this. Most other weapons didn't succeed at that during the period.

user you and your ilk make Veeky Forums worth browsing.

Low country warfare just seems silly.

>polevaulting, skiing

Dude number one is the most Veeky Forums thing I have ever seen.

Obligatory

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Landsknecht formation, guns on the side and halberds in the center

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Thats German Landsknechts, they are like bad Chinese rip offs from Swiss soldiers. During the Swabian war the Landsknecht got completely wrecked by the Swiss.

Der Weisskunig is a thinly veiled Biography of Maximilian I, emperor of the holy romans. He started the Swabian war with Switzerland and got soundly beaten. The pics you see are 16th century propaganda.
The Swiss actually trashed the Germans in seven consecutive battles, and most of the time massacred the better part of the enemy forces.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_War

On that pic, please not that in medieval battle pictures it is not one scene, it is several scenes that show the battle on multiple points of time. top of the picture is swiss troops comming from the woods and taking the German gun emplacements, middle of the pic is the main clash between armies, not ethe mounted knights on German side and halberds and pikes on the Swiss side.
Bottom part is the killing spree that followed the rout of the Germans.

>the US being a Republic was revolutionary
being an elective republic sure, but being a Republic wasn't new at that time

don't forget ice-skating

>no roman short sword + great shield formations
Rodeleros.

Man that surely would be chaos, just imagine when the opposing pike formations collided.

AH LA BELLE ESCALADE

>it was revolutionary because it countered armored, mounted knights

t. video game historian

Agreed.

>just imagine when the opposing pike formations collided.
That picture is literally titled 'Bad War', which is what the Italians called it when two pike formations engaged each other. I think that sums up the experience pretty neatly.

Can someone please fucking elaborate

There's nothing silly in skis.

>Urs Graf, Swiss mercenary, whoremonger and artist, early 16th century.

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You forgot goldsmith

Pikes keep infantry at bay, and can drive them off entirely, whereas halberds are great at fucking up cavalry. The Swiss were mostly halberdiers with a small percentage of pikemen in their ranks during the Burgundian wars, where they repeatedly crushed Burgundian heavy cavalry. But it's after their early wars with the Austrians when they began to dismount their knights, and when they started facing increasingly more professional German and Italian infantry, that they started to increase their pikemen.

Also, one does not actually keep cavalry at bay with melee weapons so much as with a cohesive formation that denies cavalry the ability to maneuver through it and with missile weapons to disrupt their own cohesion.

Also, you tend to find professional pikemen in this era coming from areas that had extensive infantry-on-infantry combat between mountain tribes or urban militia - the Scots, the Flemish, the Swiss, Andalucians, etc. Even in antiquity you see pikes emerge in areas where the most common fighting was between infantry-based armies, like the Greeks, Macedonians, and Germans.

And large two-handed swords did the same job as halberds when fighting other infantry, and its popularity within some states mostly came from the civilian fencing tradition at the time.

Men were always striving to look fashionably manly and fabulous in every age. It's just that we find some more fashionable to us, and so the fashions before and after that favored time are less impressive for us since fashion tends to reflect some sort of change or revolt from earlier forms.

He had many talents

>revolution

A revival of something over a thousand years ago can be seen as a revolution. Even then the Swiss pike formation can be seen as inferior in some ways to the Macedonian Phalanx of Alexander's day. Talking about the pikemen alone, not the the messy pike&shot formations that came after.

To be honest the Swiss had the advantage in some regards.

No shields
Longer swords
Halberds mixed with pike
Shot and crossbow forming a skirmisher screen.

I reckon the Swiss would have fared better against Romans due to longswords and halberds.