Stilettos are known as pointed, long heels on women's shoes, stiletto knives mainly as Italian-style dagger knives, which nasty street gangs used to pull off their victims in the middle of the 20th century. Both became popular mainly through the cinema. The origin was almost forgotten, but the real, traditional stiletto has a long history. A story that inspires philosophizing.
Origins of the Stiletto
The name stiletto goes back to the Latin word stylus for the metal pen or stylus, the word stiletto comes from the Italian to the same origin. The stabbing weapon is similar to a dagger, but is only suitable for stabbing and is primarily aimed at the heart. The blade is slender and pointed, mostly triangular in cross-section, occasionally square.
The stabbing weapon, which was quite popular at the time, appeared in northern Italy in the early 16th century and is unmistakably related to the parrying dagger. Compared to the dagger, the stiletto is slimmer and smaller, and its crossguards are short and straight. They are little more than a decorative element that gives the stiletto the symbolic shape of a cross. The blade is very narrow and not flexible at all, the tip is fine like a needle.
The heyday of the stiletto was around 1600, and it fell into oblivion about fifty years later. The ban on the weapon, which was considered insidious, in many cities contributed to this. However, it could easily be circumvented, as the stiletto seems made for concealment.
The stiletto as a giver of grace
One of the original names of this knife from Italy was Misericordia (Latin for mercy), in the German-speaking world "Gnadenspender" or "Gnadgott". Among other things, it was used to relieve a wounded opponent on the battlefield from his suffering by means of a surgically precise heart stab – at a time when there was not much medical evidence to offer when someone had serious injuries. Even a leg amputation was extremely painful and crippled a person. Multiple serious injuries led to an agonizing death. The stiletto shortened this suffering.
Insidious Weapon
Another purpose was to penetrate chain mail, which offered relatively good protection against cutting and cutting weapons. The stiletto's slender, pointed blade passed through here fairly easily. But it had another advantage, because it left no major traces, but was still highly effective and thus recommended for dishonorable, insidious murder. In Schiller's poem "Die Bürgschaft" it is described right at the beginning how a "dagger in the robe" serves as a tool of the tyrant killer. A file served the same purpose in the assassination attempt on the Austrian Empress Sisi.
The artilleryman's stiletto
But the artillerymen of the past also carried a stiletto with them:it possibly served as a defensive weapon, but certainly to render the cannon unusable if it fell into enemy hands. Then you should ram it into the ignition hole and break off the blade. Treated in this way, the cannon could only be used again after extensive post-processing.
Contemporary use of the stiletto
The stiletto is not recommended for martial arts exercises, as it becomes a dangerous weapon even in the inexperienced hand and is technically inferior to the parrying dagger in fencing. There are also no known defense techniques with this purely offensive weapon. Since no insidious techniques are practiced in martial arts, but rather open forms of fighting, there is no use for the stiletto there.
Thus, the collector has less practical use of this traditional knife. On the other hand, one can deal with these old pieces far better on a philosophical level, because with no other knife are insidiousness and mercy so close together as with the stiletto.