Weapons & Warriors: The Morning Star of the Europeans

Art by Steven DeVon Jones

Many people have always confused the Morning Star with a mace or flail. Even I used to do it when I was first learning about bludgeoning weapons while playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. I knew a mace had a metal shaft with a balled end for crushing things, and I knew the flail had chains. When I ran across the morning star, I was lost. Over the years I’ve stumbled across various people calling a mace a morning star, and sometimes a flail.

In truth, the Morning Star is not the same thing. It isn’t anything like a flail because the Morning Star does not have any chains. It is more closely related to the mace in shape, but that’s where the similarities end. Instead of nubs or angles around the balled end, the Morning Star has a large spike protruding from the top and the ball is covered in smaller spikes or sharpened edges.

There is no uniform version of a Morning Star because it is simply a club-like bludgeoning tool with spikes. They vary in size, from small easily held in one hand types to long heavy two handed shafts with a massive spiked head. While the mace evolved into a steel shaft with a rounded head, the Morning Star retained its wooden shaft. The spikes could be made from virtually anything, but in Europe it was generally steel or iron. 

Weapons & Warriors: The Flail of the Hussites

There are many different variations of the Flail, but one of the most vicious and deadly was one of the earliest versions. The Flail’s original design was based from an agricultural tool of the same name. One of the earliest people to turn the tool into a devastating weapon were the Hussites in the early 1400’s. This group of people was not actually made up of warriors, but was driven into a civil war over religious beliefs.

Hussite Flail Art by TL Jeffcoat

The Hussites were one of the earliest groups to turn against the Roman Catholic Church in an attempt to return to a strictly bible based religious culture. This meant they did not accept several doctrines they felt were not originating from the bible that the Roman Catholic Church practiced. In a way, the Hussites were the harbingers of what Martin Luther eventually founded as the Lutheran Church, although there were several similarities, the Hussites were not early Lutherans. I’m not going to go into detail on the religious differences of these three churches, but anyone who knows history, knows the old Roman Catholic Church had a tendency to be influential in creating armies to fight religious wars (I.E. The Crusades).

After the execution of the Hussites religious leader Jan Hus, and then the death of King Wenceslaus a few years later, the Hussites claimed the lands they occupied for their own and did not acknowledge their late king's brother and the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, as their emperor. A war erupted and Sigismund, backed by the Pope, sent Crusaders to quell the uprising. The Hussites united through their religious beliefs and national pride and fought defensively for a dozen years. After defeating and tossing out the Crusaders multiple times, they had begun to attack their Catholic neighbors.