Sansing

Sansing, n. A scythe blade affixed to a sword hilt.

In 1523, Terra Mariana a peasant revolt; later historians remember it as "the Livonian Revolt," and more generally as "the Güntherite Wars." But the rebellious peasantry had more pressing things to worry about than what the hell their fight was called. Specifically, their issue was how to arm themselves for a fight against a serious (if perhaps not unchallenged) enemy: the Teutonic Order.

Peasant revolts being what they are, they naturally gravitated toward peasant weaponry. Like the IRL Hussites, one of the great weapons of the Revolt was the threshing flail, reinforced with metal. The other was the scythe [Pomm. Sansa], which saw use in a number of varieties.

The least common conversion involved mounting a sword hilt. Compared to the much larger war scythes, they were given a Pommersch diminuitive, forming a distinct word of its own: Sansing.

The Sansing's impact

The Sansing took off. It became so significant, in fact, that while the Güntherite Wars were under way, the two sides were colloquially known as the Schwertzers and the Sansingers, based on the sidearms of each side's leadership. By the final reductions of the Knights, the Güntherite forces had made a mocking ritual of sending their besieged (and soon to be defeated) opponents a pair of sansings, suggesting that they might make them fight better.

By 1550, in fact, the sansing had replaced the war flail as the national weapon of Güntherite Pomerania, and more refined versions of the same (in particular, with better hilts and lighter blades) were established as one of the defining Central European sword styles.

The sansing today

Andalusada, whose world is a bit more baroque than we are, still issues military swords. For Baltic diasporas the world over, the sansing remains one of the standards, on par with the cavalry saber or the Moorish esbat.

• Poland (and later Poland-Ruthenia) never took to it, and an enormous number of sansings were surrendered as part of the Pomeranian Reductions. By the time Pomerania won its freedom during the Burning Thirties, it had become a nationalist symbol, and has remained so ever since.
• Unsurprisingly given the name, the House of Sansinger (which features a pair of them in its coat of arms [discuss?]) issues sansings to the Principal Guards and other persons associated directly with the family. It's quite distinctive, because both Cabralia and Mexico rejected it as a national dress sword.
• Axamalla, on the other hand, has adopted it as a national sword, being far more Baltic than the rest of Mexico ever was. (As an assertion of their "plebeian" nature, most Axamallan sansings have a feature that was dropped from purpose-built sansings after the Güntherite Wars: a runic calendar.)