From what I've read, most soldiers throughout history seem to have used either swords or spears...

From what I've read, most soldiers throughout history seem to have used either swords or spears. Where did niche weapons like maces or short axes come into the equation? Were their specialized mace units? Were there situations where everyone was using a mace and no one had a sword, or would there just be one dude who brought a mace to a sword fight?

I believe the mace was to knock the enemy off their horse.

They were highly situational weapons mostly used to hit through armour and dismount a rider. Spears were the most commonplace weapon.

Short axes were used to bust up shield walls.

During the late middle ages, armor had started to reach a point where swords simply couldn't penetrate it. I'm talking about plate armor which became available from around 1300 AD onwards. The mace is better able to deal with plate armor because even if the mace doesn't penetrate, the blunt force will still transfer through, which can cause serious problems if you hit somebody hard enough. So when you see "mace" you should immediately think "late middle ages." Although the Romans were also fond of maces at various points in their history so that's more of a guideline than a rule.

Maces are specialised anti-armor weapons

So were they hanging at the sides of normal soldiers "just in case" or would the general say "call in the axe team, we need these shields down"?

...

Maces were the first pure war weapon, as in there is no real hunting or farm use for them. They appear in the very early bronze/late neolithic and were followed by helmets.
They break bones on unarmoured people so can produce more harmful wounds, say compared to a spear, when used on arms legs and head, whereas spears are torso stabbing weapons because the tip requires a prescision stab not a swing. The downside being you need to be closer, hence the little use in hunting where you want to be away from claws and teeth.

The former.

>Maces were the first pure war weapon
No that distinction goes to the sword. Maces existed as hunting weapons alongside spears, bows and javelins before they were adapted for military use.

swinging a mace is quite hard in a formation,and often time you need to sacrifice your shield
the romans used maces against Parthians cataphract and armored iberians

>During the late middle ages, armor had started to reach a point where swords simply couldn't penetrate it

Swords couldn't penetrate armor period. Maces were used against mail all the time.

>Swords couldn't penetrate armor period.
What is this autism?

With a sword you had to look for gaps in the armour but with mace you could go for hit bashing to the head giving the opponent a really bad headache, even death.

you aim for the gaps in armour , you dont try to thrust directly through it.Its not always viable to grapple with someone during a battle like this with a sword. Its far easier to swing at his head with a mace

Usually they just had a bitch boy to carry all their shit around and demanded him to give them X weapon

Not really. A mace was just a glorified club, arguably making it among the oldest of weapons. Swords are considered the ultimate symbols of military power because they exist for no function other than to kill people.

A broken bone can be set and mended relatively easily, but a laceration gets infected and piercing wounds are insanely lethal, even one of only an inch or two deep.

>Where did niche weapons like maces or short axes come into the equation?
Clubs have been used fairly often during the antique- and migration period. During the middle ages and later, maces were mostly a cavalry side-arm. The mace was also a symbol of authority, often carried by the commander.

This seems a bit of a D&D myth to me. Plate armour is actually significantly better at dealing with blunt trauma than any other kind of armour since due to its natural rigidity it transfers the force to a larger surface area which is then dampened by the padding worn underneath. In fact, maces are much better against softer types of armour lacking that rigidity such as gambeson or mail.

The spear is in many ways the ideal weapon, especially since you can vary the spear point indefinitely and still have a viable weapon.

But then things change when everyone starts using it and you become vulnerable to short range (gladius length) attacks. Which is why the Romans favored the gladius and tower shield for their infantry when everyone else was using spears and changed military history.

You can easily block spear attacks with a tower shield, allowing you to push the enemy with the shield until you have nullified their phalanx and stab them before they draw their sidearms.

That's what the spikes are for, ya dope. The weight of the mace allows it to overcome the sturdiness of the armor, and the spikes turn it into a blade or spear with extra oomph behind it to actually pierce the armor.

Take the brilliantly designed naginata for example. Not only do you have a viable spear point to stab with, but you have the dexterity of a sword edge as well, allowing it to be used both by novices as a spear line and skilled warriors with more finesse.

I would argue that a spiky mace is not particularly good at this since the other spikes might get in the way, keeping it from penetrating deeply, and it would also be quite hard to aim properly to impact in a fashion where one of the spikes would hit at an ideal angle. If you want to penetrate armour you're probably better off with a beaky war hammer or horseman's pick, but even then it's far from easy to get a good hit on a non-immobile target.

I'm pretty sure that in the late medieval period warhammers were more popular than maces.

By the 16th century armor design had gotten extremely sophisticated. But even the best suit of steel armor couldn't withstand a smack with a big hammer with all the momentum of a charging horse behind it.

However, unlike in fantasy shit real warhammers were smaller and more compact, all the better to to carry the things around and focus the force per surface area of the swing.

More to the point, the injuries were sustained through shock rather than piercing the armor.

If you can send a shockwave through someone's tin can, it doesn't matter if the armor is only dented if the ensuing shock knocked him unconscious or out of breath.

Someone post that shopped pic of Gendry

I'll never get how this happened.

IIRC, bows and spears were the most commonly employed weapons by the samurai. The naginata is clearly a spear, so it should be quite popular on war, but somehow, it got associated with females and housekeeping. Fuck, fights with naginata are almost an entirely female thing on Japan, as far as I know.

Why?

I just don't buy the bs the warriors left behind the naginata and carried bows and swords to the front lines. It seems ilogical and inefficient.

The sword fights were mostly duels between individual samurai.
Everyone started spamming mass pikemen and foot archers that made the naginata pretty useless.

I would say that it also makes for effective home defense. If you look at the way Japanese castles were built, their walls weren't always towering.

You could easily with less upper body strength (in this case as a woman) slide it through a peep hole in the defenses, and swish it back and forth to cut up whoever was invading.

3400 BC near Dublin, Ireland.

Naginata got phased out as armor (especially leg armor, since one of the standard moves involving them was swiping off the other guy's feet) got more common. The samurai left them at home and their daughters and wives started training with them for home defense.

This. Spikes on maces are meme.
Outright bullshit. Maces were cavalry weapons, used all the time before plate armours started being used. In fact, plate armours made maces obsolete, and they become ceremonial etc. weapons. Instead of maces, warhammers happened. But it was still cavalry weapon.