The Romans have developed legions, much more maneuverable infantry formations whose legionnaires were equipped with swords and pilums, these lighter spears whose tips bent on impact, making it impossible to remove and re-launch towards the legionnaires. But the legionnaire's main weapon remains his sword, that short sword whose blade caused terrible wounds to the point where even the Greeks feared this weapon. Of Spanish design, the sword is probably one of the most important weapons of antiquity, along with the Greek sausage.
It is said that Rome's power resided in its army, but in addition to being disciplined, a military force must be equipped with weapons that demonstrate "tactical versatility". The pilum provides the legionnaires with the throwing element, but without restricting the movements of a unit that must quickly rotate to cope with a particular situation. This is where the sword came into play, giving the legionaries a shock weapon that did not get in the way of their movements.
At sea, the Romans were also innovative, but there is a double problem here. On the one hand, they had to build a navy from scratch and, on the other hand, they had to face the powerful Carthaginian fleet that dominated the Mediterranean during the Punic Wars. It was then that the Romans developed a technology for boarding enemy ships called the raven, which was a kind of bridge with a point at its end. When it hit the deck of an enemy ship, it imprisoned both boats, allowing the Roman infantry to fight with their infantry tactics, although the tremors of the sea made deployments inconvenient.
On land, and in line with what the Assyrians did, Roman engineers perfected siege techniques as well as defensive systems, all in the logic that once conquered, the land should be kept and developed, or even colonized. The Romans built new siege engines to reduce enemy positions and erected powerful fortifications to secure territorial control, not to mention the important road system to ensure communications and move supplies and legions from one point of the empire to another depending on the situation. As an example of fortifications, the most famous dating from Roman times remains Hadrian's Wall in England. Again, the idea is to combine technical know-how with available local materials to build a defensive structure to keep away warring tribes that have not yet been pacified and civilized.
However powerful and technically competent they may have been, the Romans had serious problems adapting to military technologies resulting from a much more mobile war. Although the Romans had roads to move the legions and they constituted heavy infantry that moved quickly from a strategic point of view, they could experience tactical mobility difficulties, especially in the face of a mounted enemy. By definition, the latter is much more mobile, so that the first so-called "barbarian" invasions put the almighty Roman military machine to the test. In this respect, the introduction of the stirrup provided the rider with a much more stable fighting platform, which allowed him to engage the Roman enemy at a time and place of his choosing. In this context, it can be assumed that the mobility of the barbarian cavalry and its control of the strategic agenda somehow undermined the advantages offered by the Roman road system.
Thus, by receiving blows, Rome saw its empire fall at the end of the 5th century AD. The fall of the western part of the empire coincided with the rise of certain peoples, including the Franks. They used to campaign with the terrible Franciscus, which was simply a throwing ax thrown at the opponent when starting the hand-to-hand combat.
This brand of innovation as part of a context of transition between two periods of history. The end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages in the West saw a mixture of civilizations resulting from strong migratory movements of peoples from East to West Europe so that on the military level, we witnessed a rather interesting mixture of weapons technologies.