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Figurę 73. The latten-inlaid mark on the Pontirolo sword. This also shows rhe rust-pits on the blade very clearly.

1200. Another version of this mark, this time a Cross Fourchć without a circle, is on the blade of a fine Type XIIIA sword which was found about half-a-century ago behind sonie 14th-century paneling in a house in Linz, in Austria, which was buiLt circa 1280 and demolished in 1938.

This is soon to be published by the Dircctor of the Museum of Prague, so I will not illustrate it herc, but it is a most significant weapon, and I hope I may be able to show it in a later chapter. This encirclcd cross mark is to be found also on two of Dr. Leppaaho's Viking blades, while perhaps one of the finest specimens of all is inlaid in latten (as all these others

are) on the blade of a late-14th-century sword which, in almost literally mint condition, was preserved in the Bayerisches National Museum in Munich.

I know of three other swords of these heroic dimensions: one is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a Type XIV dating from perhaps circa 1325, so I will reserve descrip-tion of it to a later chapter; but the other two are of the same datę as the one we are consider-ing. The first of these is a simply tremendous sword in the Musee de 1'Armee in Paris. There seems to be no evidence at all as to where it came from, so we have only the sword itself to indicate its datę. This can pretty confidently be placed somewhere between circa 1050 and 1150; a very vague dating, but the best we can do, lacking other evidence than MS illustra-tions madę during this period of one hundred years. It is splendid - no, better. It's a magnifi-cent sword, or at least it was when I saw and handled it in 1965. In spite of its size and weight - I wasn't able to weigh it, of course - it handles like a good tennis racket or fishing rod. Its blade is nearly 4 inches wide at the hilt, and is about 42 inches long, and it is in good, usable condition. Its grip is covered with a wrapper of sil\'er, ridged to simulate a wire bind-ing. Experts of the past asserted that this was a 19th century replacement, but it looked very original to me. I have madę a drawing of it for the illustration, for though I have a photo-graph, it gives no idea of the size of it. Alongside this, I show another sword of probably about the same datę (a Type XIIIB) which was sold at Sotheby's in London in 1935. I madę this drawing of it; I was only an insignificant art student then, not in a position to ask for a photograph as I do now. This is a really enormous blade, but being balanced by an equally large pommel, it balances well in spite ofits weight.

As a guide to the size of these two swords, I have drawn another beside them to the same scalę. This is a fine Type XII; it used to be in a Spanish collection, but now is in the Musee de 1'Armee in Paris. Known always as "The Sword ofSt. Martin," it is thought to have belonged to a King of Aragon in the middle of the 13th century.

Returning our attention to the big Pontirolo sword with which I began, I think that, on account of the region in which it was found and the condition ofits surfaces, which indicate indoor preservation, there is reason to connect it, however tentatively, with an interesting and verv significant battle which was fought in the region in 1176.

The battle was an incident, though a decisive one, in the continuous warfare which bedeviled the politics of Northern Italy for over two hundred years because the German mon-archs, rulers of the "new" so-called Roman Empire which had begun with Charlemagne in 800,