Talk:Cursed Bite/@comment-50.158.0.103-20150401062229/@comment-78.71.124.93-20160306180710

If it existed, it's unlikely that it was an especially old art, as saber-type swords didn't become popular in Europe until around the Renaissance, introduced from the east. They could be found earlier in eastern Europe after the attempted Mongol invasion, however. It also depend a bit on what you define as a "saber." Some grosse messers and kriegsmessers can technically be considered sabers and the larger ones may have had the kind of cutting reputation. There's also the Swiss saber, which is basically a bastard sword or longsword with a saber blade. They were presumably used similarly to equivalent double edged sword (of which we actually have quite a lot of material to work with) but with a more cutting focused style.

(European fighting styles that are effectively "lost", leaving us with only guesswork, go back to about the 14th century and earlier. For example, we know that kite shields were very popular at one point but we don't really know how they were used since there are no surviving manuals. There are also some weird weapons we haven't actually found, but that show up in art often enough that we can assume they probably existed at some point.)

I'd like to add, it's not like everyone forgot about swords the moment firearms showed up. It was actually some four or five hundred years where firearms slowly overtook melee weapons and the technology improved. In fact, guns actually lead to a greater variety of swords and other melee weapons because they made armor increasingly obselete, meaning you could use many different kinds of swords without having to worry about how well they would deal with for example plate armor. The real reason with don't know as much about older European fighting styles as we'd like is because the manuals are so rare, and the fencing arts that survived evolved too much into something completely different.