Halberd and pikes (and make it able to push back approaching horsemen), as was the hook opposite the axe head, which could be used to pull horsemen to the ground. A Swiss peasant used a halberd to kill Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, decisively ending the Burgundian Wars in a single stroke. Researchers suspect that a halberd or a bill sliced through the back of King Richard III's skull at the Battle of Bosworth. The halberd was the primary weapon of the early Swiss armies in the 14th and early 15th centuries. Later, the Swiss added the pike to
Altarpiece of the Halberd Altarpiece of the Halberd The Altarpiece of the Halberd is a painting from around 1539 by the Italian High Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto. It is housed in the Pinacoteca civica Francesco Podesti of Ancona, central Italy. The work was seen by the art biographer Giorgio Vasari in the church of Sant'Agostino in Ancona, where Lotto had fled in reply to the hostility received in Venice. It was later moved to the church of Santa Maria della Piazza and, after other locations, the current one. The painting dates to a few years after the coup by which Ancona had been restored