If movies have not lied to me (😜), knights’ tournaments are involve hacking, slashing, and jousting each other. How did they not kill each other using such weapons or speed on horses? And if it was actually dangerous, why did they participate?
In: 155
Pre-broken and blunted lances designed to shatter on impact for jousting.
Blunted weapons and full plate armour for melees.
Death’s weren’t massively uncommon but prizes were good so people chanced it.
Tournament armor was heavier than battle armor, and they were using blunted weapons. It was a sort of sport, modern boxers can get a concussion too, they still do it for fame and money, and so did the knights.
Oh, they did die. Henry II of France famously died due to an eye and brain injury sustained during a jousting bout. Wood splinter got in his eye.
>And if it was actually dangerous, why did they participate?
The recognition they would get was often worth the risk to them. The sport was dangerous, and people did die, but it was a relatively uncommon occurrence and they felt it would show their bravery and honor to everyone else.
Jousting armour is insanely protective.
In normal combat you have to balance manouvrability and visibility with protection (can’t fight if you can’t see) but in a jousting contest your only opponent is coming from straight ahead, and you never have to get off your horse.
So jousting armour gave you impenetrable protection at the expense of being basically immobile, if you look up a frogmouth helmet you’ll see that you can barely see anything out of them, in fact you have to lean your head forwards to see out at all.
That helmet was also usually rivited to your chest plate so you couldn’t turn your head either, your arms had nearly now movement (since all you had to do was hold a lance straight).
All that meant there were no gaps or weak points in your armour which meant there was no risk in being hit somewhere unarmoured.
Some later jousting armour was barely even armour it was more like a small shed on top of a horse that you sat in rather than something you wore.
On top of all that, your opponent also wasn’t trying to kill you, jousting lances are blunt, and usually designed to be weaker than the armour they’re aiming at, so it was common to see lances splinter on impact (which also had the benefit of looking cool).
And you had a shield attached to your shoulder that sat in front of your chest as another layer of armour, and that’s where your opponent was aiming, the shield was the easiest place to hit (being a large flat surface, as opposed to the rest of your armour being angled and curved to deflect blows) and the aim was to dehorse your opponent, so hitting the shield was the best way to do so.
For jousting: heavier armour than what would be used in normal battle & jousting lances for these tournaments were designed to break instead of pierce.
Jousting required specialized equipment.
Primarily, heavier armor. A full suit of normal plate weighed about sixty pounds. Hefty, but that’s similar to what a modern soldier carries into battle, and knights were [surprisingly mobile](https://youtu.be/qzTwBQniLSc). Jousting armor was much heavier and thicker, especially in the torso, by comparison.
Also, the lances were designed to limit penetration, either by blunting it or other methods to spread out the point of impact.
However, fact is that jousting was very dangerous and there were several fatalities over the centuries.
The thing is, at first they didn’t bother trying not to kill each other. The earliest tournies were just a bunch of bored knights gathering on either side of a field and then going at it. Blunted swords were an innovation! In a weird way it was like auto racing. At first nobody gave a sh- about safety. Then people realized it was a way to make money, and they started making it safer. And each step was a real innovation. They had to think up blunting lances, making them frangible, if you’re never getting off the horse make that armor as thick as you can, and so on.
If you were rich and could afford heavy armor, you were ok. If you were poorer and had cheap armor, you might get injured. Freak accidents did happen that would cause death, but unlike GOT would have you believe, most Knights went uninjured. Just like modern-day Bull Riders, you can make the sport safer, but there is always risk involved.
Professional football players and boxers have a 100% chance of suffering traumatic brain injury during their careers (literally–a study of the brains of deceased football players showed that *all of them* had CTE). They still do it. Money, fame, glory, the belief in young people in their immortality, are probably all contributing factors.
As in modern sports, medieval athletes took steps to protect themselves. The goal wasn’t to kill each other. They wore special armor and used blunted weapons.
Of course, sometimes people died, but people die in modern sports, too. To say nothing of the severe and debilitating brain damage they suffer from repeated concussive injuries.
Tournaments were dangerous, though the equipment limited this, however there was a lot to be gained from them in terms of honour, reputation, status and hard cash. William Marshall became wealthy from his success in tournaments and attracted the attention of the royal family, he went from penniless second son and knight-errant to the right hand man to 5 kings, regent of England and Earl of Pembroke.
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