Hi Jim, the sword from Malaja Pereschepina is connected to the Bulgars before they were displaced from the North of the Caucasus by the Hazars to the Balkans, due to a ring found in the burrial bearing the name of the Great Khan Kubrat, father of the founder of the Bulgarian State Khan Asparauh. It is straight, you are absolutely right. There are straight swords, double edged or single edged found in nowadays Bulgaria from the same period, from which curved sabres have been discovered, sometimes even from the same archeological site.
In Medieval Bulgaria the sabre started to lose popularity as a weapon for various reasons, the main one I guess being the huge Byzantine cultural and material influence, and it was replaced by the straight sword by the 10th century, as the only examples of sabres discovered then are those associated with the Magyar incursions. I believe something similar happened with the sabres of the Magyars themselves: at some point they simply went out of fashion. I do not have any information whether the Cumans, an ethnicity very close to the Bulgars, had any sabres, and Russian museums tend to attribute everything associated with the Volga Bulgars to the Mongols. I agree with you that the sabre as a weapon form gained large popularity only when it was reintroduced by the Ottomans in the 16th century.
|
10th January 2005, 04:55 PM
Threaded Mode