I scratched my head to understand the meaning of the smith’s mark stamped on one side of the blade. It dawned on me that blade smiths in 16thC often had poor literacy. It seems to me that the letters are in reverse order (read from right to left) and the letter S has mistakenly been confused with the letter G (quite similar but with the lower loop closed). The text between the stars on the smith’s mark then reads G E N D O V A or GENOA in today’s standardised spelling.
In “Fringia Die endlose Geschichte einer Klingeninschrift” by Friedrich Jäger (2013) he mentions multiple Genoa marks spelled as GENOVA, GENEVA, GENEVE, etc.
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