Dagger

The Italian thrusting-only dagger

The stiletto is a thrust-only dagger developed in 15th-century Italy, with a thin, rigid blade of triangular or square (sometimes round) cross-section: it has no cutting edge at all and attacks only with its needle point. Some 15–30 cm long, the slender, stiff, awl-like blade was specialized to drive precisely into the gaps of plate armor — the armpit, the joints, the eye-slit of a helm — or between the rings of mail. Small and hard, easy to hide under clothing, it served both as a battlefield armor-piercing dagger and as a weapon of self-defense and assassination. A narrow, deep stab wound looks small but is deadly, which fixed its image as 'the stealthy assassin's blade' and later influenced military fighting-knife designs in many countries.

India's push dagger with a transverse grip

The katar is a push-dagger peculiar to India: an H-shaped horizontal grip set at right angles to the blade, held in the fist so that the blade juts forward over the knuckles, straight in line with the forearm. Because of this, one does not swing it but stabs as if throwing a punch, driving the force of the arm and the body weight into a single point at the tip. Its blade ranges from about 30 to 90 cm, and many were made with a thickened, reinforced point to punch through mail. It appeared in 14th-century South India and reached its height under the Mughal Empire, and among the finer pieces there is a split, or scissor, variant whose blade opens to either side into three prongs when the grip is squeezed. Its indigenous Indian name is the jamdhar.