Gastald Macemen

Overall strategy
Clad in armour betraying Roman, German and even Turkic influence owing to their exposure to all three cultures, Gastaldi ("stewards") form an elite corps of warriors, fighting on foot with maces. These units are not nobles, but are in fact paid officials attached to Crown authorities, and are thus meant to function as a corps of loyal retainers for the king, meant to oversee and administer their sovereign's territories, and if need be, die defending them.

As warriors, these units form a corps of elite infantry not too dissimilar to the elite retinues of other Germanic nations. Their armour and maces make them fearsome opponents if attacked using melee infantry, and they also do a  decent job assaulting buildings, otherwise their cost and their susceptibility to cavalry and archers do not make them particularly fearsome. However, these are not your average heavy infantry - they are armed not with spears, but with maces, making them deadly as their weapons don't just grant them the ability to deal armour-piercing damage, but to attack with the same speed as sword infantry.

So Gastald Macemen, while being capable of resisting cavalry, are actually better used for punishing enemy armoured infantry and breaking Spearmen at close range. Do bear in mind, however, that even as they are very well-armoured, they are not invincible: ranged units, particularly Caucasus Huntsmen or Horse Archers can tear them apart if not properly contained, so Gastald Macemen are best used for melee fights where they can bring their force to bear fully upon the foe.

Background
A club is also a simple blunt weapon, usually made of wood. It is the simplest of all weapons, and has other names such as baton, cudgel, night-stick, and bludgeon. Unlike many fighting weapons, clubs don't pierce or slash, but they crush, often inflicting bruises. It is a good idea to make a club out of the sturdiest wood possible, so it wouldn't break in the middle of combat. The length also matters; if a club is too short, it will be hard to reach your foe, but if it is too long, the weapon could be hard to use. Clubs, both straight and shaped, were found near the now-famous Tollense archaeological site in northern Germany during a dig in 1996 CE.

A variant of the club was the mace, which would have had a shaped head, meant to induce greater damage per blow. While it would seem unwieldly, the one advantage a mace had over a sword was that it could cause trauma damage even if it came into contact with armour. While maces were primarily used by cavalrymen of ages up to the Mediaeval era, the use of the mace as an infantry weapon was not unheard of.