Three-quarters armor and Pappenheimer rapier of a cuirassier, circa 1620. The red sash would identify the wearer as an officer of the Holy Roman Empire. The helmet is of the lobster tailed pot style, a design often associated with Eastern Europe but popularized as a universal cavalry helmet in the the first half of the 17th century. It was also called a zischägge, a Germanization of chichak, the Turkish helmet it was based on.
This image helps to illustrate the often understated size of rapiers. This particular sword’s blade probably measures slightly over 40 inches long. It’s no surprise that many cavalry troopers of the period chose to carry such weapons as their sidearms, since the long reach would have proven invaluable when fighting from horseback.
Nice armour! The lobster-tail pot, worn with breast- and back-plate, buff-coat and big boots is visual shorthand for “English Civil War Roundhead” who as everyone knows were Right but Repulsive. (Charles I’s cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantic.)
For reference, here’s what a Turkish chichak (çiçak) looked like on the Ottoman equivalent of full armour. It has a similar brass tube to the OP one, which is for a plume. It’s off to the side because of the nasal bar, but might also mark the wearer’s rank - left =
lieutenant, right = captain, both sides = major, that sort of thing. (NB that this IS just guessing)…
That’s a good point (sorry) about rapiers: the mistaken belief that they were fairly short, light and nimble comes from an assumption that they were like (a) smallswords, their descendants, which really were short, light and nimble, or like (b) sport swords, especially epées, which are descendants of smallswords and are featherweights by comparison with anything real.
“The Rapier and Smallsword” (© A.V.B. Norman 1980) quotes some English regulations about rapier lengths: in 1562 “no swerd to be butt a yerd and a quarter of length”
-
that’s 45 inches or nearly 4 feet and a very long blade indeed, since the repro
1530s rapier of my avatar is just 46 inches overall, point to pommel - and in
1615 the authorities even placed
“selected grave Cittizens at every Gate to break the Rapiers poynts of all passagers that exceeded a yeard in length of their Rapiers”.
The “rapiers are short, light and nimble” notion got enhanced during the Golden Age of Hollywood swashbucklers. Several stars were sport fencers (Basil Rathbone and Tyrone Power were notably good,
Cornel
Wilde was even better, qualifying for the 1936 US Olympic team
) and used sport-fencing moves regardless of period. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in “Swordsmen of the Screen” © Jeffrey Richards 1977. An updated edition would be great.
Many fencing swords appear “in costume”, with knucklebows and crossguards fitted to otherwise-standard foil or epée hilts (below, second from left and centre)…
…and many SCA and HEMA rapiers are made up this way for safety since fencing blades are flexible…
…but real rapiers are not.
Rathbone fenced against Power with sport sabres pretending to be military swords in “The Mark of Zorro”. (you can just see the dark safety tip on Rathbone’s blade)..
…fought Errol Flynn with foils pretending to be smallswords in “Captain Blood” (Rathbone’s blade has got bent in the process )…
…and fought Flynn again, epée-style, with lightweight versions of 12th-century arming swords in “The Adventures of Robin Hood”…
Rathbone
later said:
”Power was the most agile man with a sword I’ve ever faced before a camera. Tyrone could have fenced Errol Flynn into a cocked hat.“ On the other hand
“The only actor I actually fought with on the screen was Flynn, and that’s the only time I was really scared. I wasn’t scared because he was careless* but because he didn’t know how to protect himself.”
(* Errol Flynn was very careless. He usually got over-excited during fencing scenes and forget choreography in favour of ad-lib slashing and leaping about. This is what scared Rathbone: a skilled fencer could defend against wild slashes and make it look good, but Flynn could accidentally leap onto Rathbone’s point because he didn’t know it would be there. TVTropes calls this sort of all-sizzle-no-steak stage combat “Flynning” with good reason.)
Flynning is visual, and difficult to describe unless making plain in every other line that this IS Flynning and at least one combatant knows it, but no less than Daffy Duck manages verbal Flynning with a quarterstaff (actually a $1.25 or buck-and-a-quarter staff): “Ho! Ha ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!”
A realistic fight has no Ho! or Ha! and ends with that “Thrust!” but Flynning will rinse and repeat until the audience is nearly bored. The swordfights in “Pirates of the Caribbean” went on and on, and on, well past the “nearly” bored point, at least for me.
To see how a long fight is done properly, watch the final duels between Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer in “Scaramouche”, or (shorter but IMO better for story and character*) Liam Neeson and Tim Roth in “Rob Roy”.
(*The hero LOST this fight, and would have died had the villain - established as highly skilled but sadistic - not played with him by stretching the killing moment a bit too long.)