Armament was seven cannon, 102 gads (iron spears), bows and arrows, spears and poleaxes.
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The community's arms might be described thus: Gules two poleaxes argent in saltire, in base a mount of ten bricks Or. Poleaxes were once known in German as Parten (they are more commonly called Hellebarden now), while bricks are Bausteine, or simply Steine if the context makes it needless to specify what kind of “stones” they are. These charges make the arms canting for the name Partenstein. The tinctures gules and Or (red and gold) are taken from the arms formerly borne by both the Counts of Rieneck and the Counts of Hanau, who were of great import to the community’s history. The tinctures gules and argent (silver) recall the Electorate of Mainz's hegemony.
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Maces, war hammers and the hammer-heads of pollaxes (poleaxes) were used to inflict blunt trauma through armour. Strong blows to the head might result in concussion even if the armor is not penetrated. Fluted plate was not only decorative, but also reinforced the plate against bending under slashing or blunt impact. This offsets against the tendency for flutes to catch piercing blows.
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Some of the finds are known to have been sent as gifts to government officials and members of the Imperial family; in 1839 and 1843, the head of a mace and the blade of a sword were gifted to Emperor Nicholas I by a Kulikovo nobleman. While preparing his work "Parishes and Churches of the Tula Diocese" (1895), editor Pavel Malitsky received reports from inhabitants of the Tula Oblast, who had found spearheads, poleaxes and crosses on the field. Spears and arrows dug out by the locals are also mentioned in the worksheets of the Tula provincial academic archival commission.
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Others may have worn a padded gambeson or a leather jerkin or coat, though these would not have survived decomposition in the ground after the battle. Unusually, many of the Gutes appear to have had minimal head protection, with many skulls wearing only a mail coif; however any helmets may have been stripped from the bodies after the battle. Very few weapons have been discovered, but it is likely that both sides used round and heater-type shields, spears, axes, billhooks, pikes, and poleaxes. For close combat, both sides would have had swords, light axes, war hammers, and maces.
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Soldiers fought with spears, large shields with an eye-hole, clubs, axes, poleaxes, flails, bows, slings, and swords of various forms. Later, martial styles as varied as Gidigbo (a form of wrestling practiced by the Yoruba people of Nigeria), Donga (a form of stickfighting practiced by the Suri people of Ethiopia), Musangwe (a form of bare-knuckle boxing practiced by the Venda people of South Africa), Tahtib (a form of stickfighting practiced by the Copts of Egypt) and Engolo (a form of kicking, dodging and leg sweeping practiced by the tribes of the Cunene river region of Angola), to name just a few, were developed by cultures all over Africa.
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The introduction of missile weapons that required less skill than the longbow, such as the crossbow and hand cannon, also helped remove the focus somewhat from cavalry elites to masses of cheap infantry equipped with easy-to-learn weapons. These missile weapons were very successfully used in the Hussite Wars, in combination with Wagenburg tactics. This gradual rise in the dominance of infantry led to the adoption of dismounted tactics. From the earliest times knights and mounted men-at-arms had frequently dismounted to handle enemies they could not overcome on horseback, such as in the Battle of the Dyle (891) and the Battle of Bremule (1119), but after the 1350s this trend became more marked with the dismounted men-at-arms fighting as super- heavy infantry with two-handed swords and poleaxes.
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The cost of training was minimal, since these conscripted farmers had spent most of their lives in the familiar use of these "weapons" in the fields. This made polearms the favored weapon of peasant levies and peasant rebellions the world over. Pole arms can be divided into three broad categories: those designed for extended reach and thrusting tactics used in pike square or phalanx combat; those designed to increase leverage (thanks to hands moving freely on a pole) to maximize centrifugal force against cavalry; and those designed for throwing tactics used in skirmish line combat. Because their versatility, high effectiveness and cheap cost, polearms experimentation led to many variants and were the most frequently used weapons on the battlefield: bills, spears, glaives, guandaos, pudaos, poleaxes, halberds, harpoons, sovnyas, tridents, naginatas, war scythes and javelins are all varieties of pole arms.
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