Moonduck

We used short blades, aye. The majority of the stuff we did was either long knife length or machete, as you said. The standard weapons are barongs after all.

From what I've seen, the only Filipino style what uses anything longer is Arnis, and I would personally wonder if Arnis was influenced by the Spanish school fencing style used by some of the Conquistadores. Arnis de mano means, literally "Harness of Hand" and refers to the strapping used to protect the hands of the Arnis practitioner. The reason the hand was protected was because it is the primary target for Arnis practitioners. The idea being that if you disabled the hand, the man cannot hold a sword or gun and cannot fight. This is also why they stayed at long range, unlike the more brutal in-your-face style of Kali.

Short blades are so much easier to deal with both in trapping range, for obvious reasons, and when doing two-weapon. The reason they are more useful in two weapon style is simple leverage. The shorter blades require much less wrist and hand strength to move in the patterns that two-weapon uses.

Another reason we concentrated on knives was the mindset of the school. It was a practical real-world style of instruction, and no one carries a machete in the city. A knife is much more handy and easy to conceal, so much of our training was how to handle knives.

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"The Style is almost Mythical, Knowen as Whirling Dervish. The style of Fighting was so unique theat Western Knights, with our Armor and Shields. Were worth less."

Worthless? Hardly. The biggest problems the Western knights had were logistics and heat issues. Western armor is hot stuff, being designed for Europe. The deserts of Outremer were ovens, and many a Westerner fell simply from dehydration and heat stroke.

The biggest reason the Dervisis were effective at all was use of psychotropics to induce fanatical, frenzied charges. True knights were heavy shock cavalry and used to having infantry, especially skirmishers like the Dervisi breaking and scattering before the massed charge. The morale of drugged fanatics is unbreakable, so they would just eat the charge and do their damnedest to cut down the horses with what dervisis remained.

EDIT: The Dervisis performed similarly during the Colonial period. There are lots of accounts of the Whirling Dervish against massed indigient riflemen. They got cut down, generally. Drugs are bad, kids.