Glaive treatise "Paradoxes of Defence" by the English gentleman George Silver, the glaive is used in the same general manner as the quarterstaff, half pike, bill, halberd, voulge, or partisan. Silver rated this class of polearms above all other individual hand-to-hand combat weapons. The Maciejowski Bible (Morgan Bible) depicts an example of a two-handed glaive used on horseback. The contemporary term for this weapon may have been "faussart", which was used for a variety of single-edged weapons seen as related to the scythe (along with terms such as "falchion", "falcata, or fauchard" derived from "falx", the Latin term for "scythe"). The
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