Steel weapon used for assault. It is a generally held opinion that the first bayonets were invented in Bayonne and that the very name given to this weapon is due to this circumstance. We read in a chronicle from the Midi in France: "During the siege of Bayonne in 1523, against the assembled kings of England and Aragon, the women of the town bravely took charge of defending the ramparts and invented the bayonet".
On the other hand, in the Western Pyrenees, there is a position called la Redoute de la Bayonette, and tradition tells us that this place was so called because, at a time that is not well determined, the Basques, having exhausted their ammunition in a fight against the Castilians, could only repel them by tying their knives to their rifles. This fact gave rise to a special weapon, with a sharp point, specially manufactured.
There is another opinion that this invention dates back to the Malay people of Madagascar, and that it was the Dutch who copied the idea of attaching a dagger to the edge of the rifle, so that the weapon would not be useless after it had been used for firing. How to find the truth in the midst of such different statements? However, it is not difficult to dismantle this scaffolding. One thing seems certain: the town of Bayonne plays a positive role in the history of the gun and in the history of its name.
Other writers have come up with an ingenious explanation which we reproduce here as a curious fact. According to them, the bayonet was not invented in Bayonne, but it was there that it was first made in a special shape, and it is there, indeed, that it continued to be made for a long time. According to General Masica, the manufacture of bayonets in Bayonne dates back only to 1641, and Gassendi goes back to 1671.
Other writers who want to explain everything by means of etymology think that baionnette actually comes from Bayonne and not from the Spanish word Bayona, "scabbard", nor from the Latin term Bayoneta, "small scabbard". The French name bayonnette became banet, appearing in Ulm (Bavaria) around 1700 [H. Fischer, 1904. Schwäbisches Wörterbuch, I, 613]. From there come other dialectal deformations such as bankenet. The form of New High German is known from Fleming in 1710 [Vollk, t. Soldat, 199]. The Bajonet of Swedish and Danish from 1693 was made possible by New High German; English bayonnet comes from French [Deutsches Etymologisches Wörterbuch Kluge].
See TIMMERMANS, Adrien. Ref. Ducéré: Art. Baïonnette, "Dictionnaire Historique de Bayonne", p. 77; Corominas, Dictionnaire Etymologique; Giese, W.: Basque military terminology, "Riev", XIX, p. 315; Gárate, J.: Berets, arms and bees, "Bol. Amer. E. V.", 1950, p. 18.
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