Alonso de Chaves on the shipboard use of the montante (Iberian two-handed sword)

All right, I’m not going to use this post to engage in a systematic or extensive discussion on the use of the two-handed sword in naval engagements. Instead, I’m just going to use it as a place to stash some stuff I’ve previously written down in a Facebook group post — which, as everyone knows, is simply not a very good way to preserve things for posterity. I’m basically just moving the information here to make it easier to find should I need to reference it again later.

The background to this whole thing was a discussion in an Indonesian HEMA chat group, where somebody brought up the subject of when and where the two-handed sword was used and I got rather irritated since most of the discussion just went around and around, bringing up modern ideas cooked up in the modern participants’ heads without backing them up with historical evidence. Eventually I started badgering people for sources, and fortunately one of them (the proprietor of Arpio Shop — go visit and buy one or two of their swords if you want to thank them for this) came up with a translated excerpt from a work titled Espejo de Navegantes, by a certain “Alonso de Chaves,” to the effect that the montante (the Iberian — that is, Spanish/Portuguese — variant of the 16th-century two-handed sword) was one of the most suitable weapons for boarding or defending a galley, somewhat linking it with Rule XI Simple (also known as the “galley gangway”) in Figueyredo. I felt like the excerpt probably came from a valid primary source, but it seemed incomplete and I wasn’t convinced that it actually referred to galleys or their gangways at all (“gangway” here being a slightly awkward translation of Portuguese coxia or Italian corsia, a subject of some debate among naval historians specialising in 16th-century Mediterranean warfare). So I started digging.