"Salut
"From the
darkness of time we came..."
- opening words of the "Highlander"
Writers of modern fencing books
hardly ever concern themselves with more than a few paragraphs on fencing's history,
juggling Vikings and duellists and knights and dungeons and dragons with merry abandon.
And as modern coaches and instructors are becoming experts in physiology, sports medicine,
nutrition, electrics and electronics, they are only too happy to pass on to their students
the ready-to-go, prepackaged factoids that have settled like dust on the records of
fencing history.
Some of these myths cropped up
through the sheer obstinacy of writers and the credulity of a reverent audience. Aldo
Nadi, fencing genius and author of the admirable On Fencing, proudly proclaimed
"I have never read more than one sentence in each of the various books on fencing,
which have been put, unsolicited, into my hands." Had he read more, he might not have
credited Giacomo di Grassi with "developing" the "single sword, a
cutting and thrusting rapier with a basket hilt"—whose predecessors can be
traced back decades before di Grassi ever set quill to paper.
Most 19th- and 20th-century
fencing writers' sections on their sport's history are well-intentioned and far less
patronizing than that of Nadi. But they, too, tend to be riddled with inconsistencies and
errors—errors that are quoted as solid truths by later writers in a game of telephone
spanning decades and centuries: A game of taking the master's practical credentials and
infering an equally well-rounded state of information into his knowledge of history.
Even the first-hand transmission
of content through the primary sources rarely occurs without glitches. Some titles are
just so rare that authors throughout the centuries had to rely mainly on second opinion
(sometimes their own prejudice) to represent their main tenets. Not even the best fencing
historians are immune to this. Take the great Aylward, for example. He claims that in
Roworth's Art of Defence on Foot, "the ancient taboo of the point is
retained."
Oddly, even a perfunctory
analysis of Roworth's work reveals that Roworth indeed devotes an entire chapter to the
thrust, and, of course, the proper defense against the opponent's thrusts.
Darn that Darwin...
I myself blame Darwin for a hefty
chunk of fencing mythology—or at least that populist school of Linear Evolutionism
that tries to squeeze each and every subject into the straitjacket of pseudo-Darwinian
criteria.
Few modern fencers and amateur
fencing historians—there are no true professionals in this game—can resist the
temptation to put current fencing phenomena into a simplistic evolutionary context in
which the present is considered a superior product of "weedin' out the weak."
This approach equates evolution with a linear process toward perfection—whose apex
usually can be found about 50 nostalgic years before the sorry state of the present.
There is really no shame in that.
After all, everyone's doing it. But that doesn't do much to put aside this inherent
contradiction: Linear Evolutionists operate from a naively condescending vantage
point—from a position of assumed superiority that uses the past as an oddity or
curiosity item to contrast the athletic achievements of the modern sport against.
(Ironically, this approximates a fundamentally creationist attitude, according to which
the present is considered the "crown of creation"—unassailable and
indisputable in all its glory and radiance... You can picture Darwin spinning in his
grave!)
Evolution is rarely a linear
development toward a final state of perfection, but rather a constant process of
adaptation and spontaneous mutation in unsuspected directions depending on a changing
environment. Dozens of extraneous factors bodychecked, manhandled, and slam-dunked the
development of swordplay until it mutated from a quick and dirty way of spilling your
adversary's guts on the ground into the protracted Olympian phraseology of the Art of
Fencing.
Among them are the sublime and
ridiculous fads of social thought, bottom-line economic considerations, the mutually
adaptive process of offensive and defensive weaponry, fashions of the day, and the changes
in legal systems and the politically correct dogma of the day. Thus, the modern sport,
having lost all functional practicality as a martial art, in Lorenzian terms could be
compared rather to evolutionary oddities, such as the paradise bird's plumage or the
exotic colors of tropical fish.
Rewriting Fencing History
Ever since Herodotus and
Thucydides, the works of historians have straddled a precarious position between
chronicling events and creating mythology. In fact, the very time line observed in the
genre of the chronicle often provides the skeleton for the myth, by artificially ordering
and weighing events retrospectively. It is the task of the historian to identify these
myths and discover the factual reality obscured by them.
This, of course, is tedious and
sometimes inconvenient work. After all, "myths create an orderly past and give us
a sense of a future in which we are greater than we can ever be today."
Historical truth, however, is elusive, disorderly—and often downright uncomfortable.
(That's why the German government, for one, does its darndest to keep historians and
researchers out of Nazi-era archives, by the way...)
Paradoxically, the information
age appears to be spawning its own breed of orderly myth, perpetuated and reinforced by
the sheer power of repetition. As the journalist John Lawton put it a few years ago:
"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to
uninformed opinion."
Striving to establish an ordered
past, structuring events from the vantage point of eclectic retrospective has dominated
the writing of fencing history in the post-Darwinian age. To obtain a more balanced idea
of the intrinsic values of long-forgotten fighting systems, I decided to abandon the
concept of progress and linear evolution that willy-nilly permeates social and other
pseudo-sciences today. Afterall, the present is not an improvement on the past, but merely
a product of randomly changing environments.
Fencing history can never really
be considered out of its social context. Weapons and the skills necessary to handle them
have never been exclusively a function of pure utility. The men wielding them were and are
products of their respective environment, its moral and legal systems, its fashions and
status symbolism. And each combative situation puts the fighters into a dramatically
different environment, in which a ray of sunlight, the personal level of stress, even the
contents of one's stomach or lower intestine could be as lethal to a fighter as the
opponent's mastery of a closed system of fighting skills.
The fencing historian has to take
all these factors into consideration before at a conclusive judgment about the quality and
effectiveness of a particular school or system.
E pluribus unum?
Since I began to publish Hammerterz
Forum in 1994, I have found myself being considered a close accomplice to
fundamentally divergent views on swordplay. My research has been interpreted as
exclusively supportive of traditional sports fencing, the Art of Fencing, Schläger
fencing, saber fencing, cut-and-thrust fencing, theatric fencing, modern Renaissance
fencing. (In fact, only top-level competitive sports fencing really doesn't care much for
historical research.)
But the purpose of my work is not
to be divisive. Let's be honest. Does it really matter if a closed system of swordplay is
theoretically superior or inferior to another? If one system is "more lethal"?
Discussions like this are about as fruitful as arguments between modern polo players and
the nomadic forefathers of the sport about the "softening" of the modern sport
because it is no longer played with the heads of your slain enemies...
The purpose of this book and Hammerterz
Forum (where many of the essays enclosed here first appeared) is to obtain a clearer
understanding of what swordplay was and meant in its changing historical environments, not
to declare any one system the evolutionary winner to the exclusion of all others.
Twenty-twenty
Hindsight—For Generations to Come!
It's easy to flex the pumped-up
biceps of late historic insight at our predecessors. But after all, the people who cared
enough about fencing to try and piece together what scattered facts and anecdotes had made
it through the ages were fencers—men of action concerned primarily with transmitting
the theoretic abstract of their practical experience.
In this volume, I will introduce
you to my own findings about the history of the sword. Findings that contradict most of
what you've read about swordfighting in the past. And I want you to join me on the far
more interesting and challenging adventure—of trying to create a new, fresh
mythology, derived from speculations about the roots of long-forgotten European martial
arts that were ancient when an ambitious Frankish chieftain by the name of Karl crowned
himself Roman Emperor.
Of course, chances are that a few
years from now, my own modest attempts will be challenged by future generations of fencers
and fencing historians—each armed with a handful of new insights, and the fiercely
independent self-assertiveness that characterizes anyone who lives and thinks by the
sword.
But if you believe that I am
about to pour the formaldehyde of academia on the history of the sword, let me assure you
that I have no intention of doing that. The lore of the sword derives its perennial appeal
from the action of the individual fighter—and the glorious (and often glorified)
word-of-mouth accounts of the survivors, retainers, and admirers. It is their accounts
that we owe our present knowledge to—and this is why I include them as interludes in
the upcoming analysis.
The examples presented in this
report are intended to provide a platform for a deeper and more thorough critical approach
to the eveluation of the sword's heritage and the study of ancient fighting systems.
(It is somewhat ironic that this
approach has only recently gained momentum, with its protagonists located mainly in the
United States, a country not readily associated with having a whole lot to offer when it
comes to swordplay...)
So buckle up and enter a world of
cunning and strength, of violence and calculated risks, of the crimson killing instincts
and the ice-cold clarity of the martial mind. Enter a world you will never be able to
fully reconstruct or fully understand:
Welcome to The Secret History of
the Sword!
J. Christoph Amberger
Baltimore, June 1997
