Explanation: In the Late Medieval Period, a revolution in infantry tactics and equipment came about, spearheaded (ha) by the Swiss. By getting together a band of highly-motivated militiamen, trusted with their own weaponry and communally trained, they discovered that the knightly elite could be held at a distance - with 3 meter+ long spears (pikes)!

While such pikes were not new, the training regimen by independent groups of Swiss militiamen, gathering disparate militia units together in case of foreign threat, operated much more aggressively than previously. Rather than a purely static formation, Swiss pikemen were trained well-enough that they could maintain a wall of pikes while walking, or even at a trot (‘pike charge’, also the name of one of the holding positions for a pike, ‘at charge’). Swiss pikemen would become the last word in European warfare for some 200 years, and their imitators would eventually form the basis of modern professional armies, replacing the ad-hoc retinues of the warrior-caste of European aristocracy.

BLUEBLOODS REKT

They didn’t always march in straight lines. Sometimes they used geography to their advantage like at Morgarten

The formations of Swiss dudes with pointed sticks were fittingly called “Gewalthaufen” which literally translates into “heaps of violence”.