Mace

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A medieval style mace

Long before Australopithecus strode the savannah, one of our distant ancestors figured out that hitting something with a good solid stick was easier on the knuckles and harder on the target. Thus was born the club. Fast forward a few million years to a camp of more advanced, but still primitive humans. One of them figures out that you could get an even better club by attaching a rock to the end of it to hit the target hit even harder. Thus was born the Mace, like the spear one of the oldest weapons.

Maces in Warfare

The first thing about a mace is that, well, a mace is a stick with a hard bit on the end that you hit your enemy with. It's pretty straightforward in it's use. Even more so than an axe or spear. At the same time, basic maces are even easier to make than spears. Attach a stone to solid stick, or hammer some metal spikes or a metal ring around the end. Like spears, they had a bargain basement quality for equipping militia with cheap backup weapons. Even so, more complex maces made entirely of metal were employed towards the end of the middle ages (more on this latter).

Unlike bladed weapons, maces did damage by blunt force trauma. They did not cleave apart or poke big holes into tissue and bone. Rather they shattered bones and pulverized organs. This has some advantages as their blows would often send force through ridged armor, though it was less effective against armor with padding behind it. Maces came in both spiked and non spiked varieties. Spiked maces had some (if not much) ability to penetrate armor and flesh. For this reason, once plate armor became common maces became one of the go to weapons used by knights for use in close quarters against other knights.

That said, a maces' blow while more likely to do some damage if they hit home were less likely to deliver a killing blow than a sword or axe strike and to do damage an mace strike needs to be moving at high speed with room to move like this.