Wonderful pics from Polish/Ukrainian collection

You can imagine how my heart broke when I realized that RaduTransylvanicus and WolvieX were no longer active members.

The infamous "Black Sea yataghan"?

As a friend of mine likes to say, "Damn a conversation that can't stand to wander a little."

Isn't the flyssa the Berber sword? And isn't the peshkabz or choora what I grew up calling "the Khyber knife"? (I blame Robert E. Howard for my understanding: a yard long, t-backed slasher of triangular blade profile, lacking a guard?)

Ha, neither Polish nor Turkish, but straight up Tatar! (Well, or Tatar style.)

Reminiscent of the now out of print Hanwei Charlemagne saber, or this lovely Peter Johnsson version. (Be sure you're sitting down with a rag at hand when you look at this one.)

www.peterjohnsson.com/early-sabre/

That's a style of saber that lasted a long, long time.

Even before I saw your post, I'd thought, "You know, I should have explained more."

I am certainly no authority on Eastern European history, but here's a quick precis. Perhaps because of the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, and of course during WW2, we have a tendency to think of "poor plucky little Poland." However, during the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, "poor plucky little Poland" included Prussia, and Ukraine as far as the Crimea. That's a huge stretch of land.

The Crimea, of course, was the home of the Tatar horde, under the Geray (or Gerei) dynasty. This was the rest and residue of the Golden Horde that had occupied and controlled Russia, the infamous "Tatar yoke" or Татарское иго. (Tatarskoe igo.) It's far too simple to draw clean lines between Central Asian Muslims and Eastern European Christians at this stage of the game, and to say that they were always opposed. Rather, the various states warred against, and allied with, each other in the same way other European states did. Purely as a "for instance," when Sweden and Russia invaded Poland (or rather, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth), the Crimean Tatars allied with the Poles to fight both the Swedes and the Russians.

Not only that, but given the expanse of territory conquered and covered by Lithuania under the Yagyello dynasty, a lot of Tatars ended up in . . . Lithuania. (And Lithuania wasn't, in any form or fashion, "poor plucky little Lithuania" either at that time.) Some of them remained Muslim, some converted to Christianity (Catholic, I should point out) and became somewhat Polonified.

The Cossacks were essentially the Russian speaking Orthodox Christians who were under Latin speaking, Catholic Polish-Lithuanian rule. The Commonwealth had an elective king (whose kin did not inherit the throne), and many of the magnates of the Commonwealth thought of themselves as kinglets, sometimes even more than as Poles. Khmelnitsky's rebellion in the 17th century (1647-1654) was carefully expressed as being against the magnates and not the king.

Just to keep things from being too boring, we also have to consider the Turks. The Ottoman Empire was in no way the "sick man of Europe" in the 16th and 17th centuries, but an aggressive and expansionist power. As the Commonwealth waned, so did the Ottoman Empire wax. Around this time, the Ottomans exercised a greater or lesser influence over the Crimean Khanate of the Tatars.

Oh, and both in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, captured slaves who adopted Islam could rise to fairly influential positions, and beyond that, people on the frontier could make informal but quite important "family alliances" across the borders, where they would pour water on their swords and agree that, notwithstanding any other little matters (like say war between the Commonwealth and the Khanate), there would be peace between them.

Lvov is just a variant spelling of Lviv.

By the perpendicular bit, do you mean the langets on the guard, projecting down the blade and along the grip?

Zablocki had this to say about the Tatar sabre: Polish military sabre with small cross-like quillons and pistol-shaped grip, also called the Tartar sabre, is an extremely efficient weapon for swinging cuts when fighting on horse-back. Points-thrusts can also be performed very efficiently. Most probably these sabres were produced for Tartar warriors fighting alongside the Polish nobility. Blades arc of circular shape, quillons short and delicate, the knob is bent forward at an angle of 45o.

Yes, langets. As much as I've been reading that word lately, I've no idea how it escaped me at the time of my post. :oops:

Fascinating bit of history, that, and clears up a lot of the "what" factor.

I'd found this particular sword coincidentally; there are two kards on that site I'm considering, should I happen to acquire sufficient funds in the near-enough future, and while there I browsed some other sections and happened to notice this sword, caught my eye as an interesting blend of things I'd been seeing about. I saw in the description that it alluded to being of Polish origin (at least, as far as where it was made) and was reminded of this thread.

So, while I knew it was not a proper "Polish sword" per se, I thought it was interesting enough to throw in here, particularly being wootz. (or so they say, frankly I can't see a thing in their photos, but I'll take their word for it)

Darn if looking at the Old World isn't a bit foggy these days. :geek:

Back atcha, Slav.