Sword of the People: Traditional Italian Knife and Stick-Fighting — Part One.

 

NB: Although reconstructed European martial traditions, or “HEMA” receive the most attention, there are still a number of living, European fighting arts that continue to be passed on, master to student, as they have for generations. Some of these, such as French savate and la canne, are relatively well-known, others, such as jogo do pau (Portuguese stick-fighting) have been virtually unknown outside of their own country until recent years.

 Italy, particularly the more conservative south, is a treasure trove of old fighting traditions, that over the centuries have been practiced by everything from shepherds to mafiosi!  Maestro Roberto Laura is an inheritor of several of these traditions and a long-time researcher into their methodology, mythology and verifiable history. In Sword of the People he tries to sort fact from fantasy, legend from history while presenting the depth, breadth and beauty of Italian fighting arts.

Currently being translated from its German original, and available in 2017, we are pleased to present this first sneak-peak at this unique and beautiful book.

 

Introduction 

 

For this endeavor, it must be noted that the knife was not considered a traitorous weapon, but as the ‘Sword of the People’ throughout the entirety of southern Italy, starting with the rural area outside of Rome.

Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli,

La Sicilia nel 1871, Florence, 1871

This book introduces readers to the path of traditional Italian knife and stick fencing schools, with the hope to thereby contribute to their conservation. It does not presume to be complete, but rather to lay a cornerstone for others to build upon.

But how should the history of the Southern Italian knife be told? For the uninitiated, these old arts were largely hidden. It is a history of secrecy, of omertà. A blending of blood-oaths, covenants and fear of reprisal combined with pride in belonging to a secret and chivalrous society, created a culture that to sought to prevent the secrets of the blade – as well as the shepherd’s stick – from falling to the ears of outsiders. This fear of exposure, when combined with the widespread illiteracy in the lower peasant classes and urban sub-proletariat of 19th century Italy, created a purely oral tradition.

Thus my research for this book began in the dark. At first it was shaped predominantly by speculation and assumptions. Over the years, I engaged not only physically but also mentally and literarily with this sub-culture of the land of my birth. I read a lot of secondary literature on the history, art and culture of southern Italy; books that at first glance seem to have little to do with the subject of the knife.

To understand any complex, incompletely understood and orally communicated area of study it is important to appreciate its essence, especially its relationship to history and culture. Only then can a judgment be made that differentiates between whether a given piece of information is likely true, or possibly not. This desire to truly understand forced me to pursue lines of inquiry that were often little more than indistinct traces or rumors. Rather than producing frustration, the mysterious nature of the search for these truths was and remains an important part of the appeal of this work. The lack of a written record around this oral tradition meant that no other approach was possible. Over the course of this uncertain journey I met both true masters, as well as those that merely assumed the title. Many provided valuable information and perspectives. With some I studied briefly, while with others I still study as I write this.

Both the true masters of this tradition, as well as the researchers who dedicate themselves to its study are critical links between the past and the present. This research opens for us all not only a world of historical Italian tradition and culture but an exploration of our own contemporary values and perceptions. Today, despite many years of effort and publication by numerous researchers Italy remains largely unappreciated and ill-understood in the sphere of martial arts.

My aim is to introduce you, the reader to this rich but currently still largely unknown tradition. This book presents not merely principles, techniques, tactics and patterns of movement, but outlines key historical factors and cultural aspects of traditional Italian fencing. As a result of this broader mission, you will find this book not laden with images of techniques, as is the case with many martial arts treatises. Instead, the broader context of these complex orally-transmitted Italian traditions is front and centre.

Without a fundamental understanding of the historical background of an epoch — its culture, traditions and the mentality of the respective population — a martial art becomes soulless; a pure instrument of death, a system of mechanics, effective, perhaps, but dead as an art. Italian martial arts are far more than mere fencing: They captivate with expressiveness and elegance, with rhythm and cultural depth. Their culture and spirit are shaped by an urban versus a rural outlook. They are partially inspired by religion, and arise from legends and myths around soldiering and chivalry. Further, the crime syndicates of southern Italy — la mafia, camorra, etc. — who maintained a mythology of being one part chivalric champions, one part criminal,  one part anarchists, also influenced them. I do not believe that deep passion for a martial cart can truly develop without at least some cognizance of its rich cultural origin and context.

 

Chapter 1-1.4

Chapter 1

Traditional Italian Knife Fighting

An Introduction

The gods did not reveal everything to man from the start,

but in time, through seeking, we may learn and know things better.

Xenophanes of Colophon

 

1.1          Preamble

Prior to delving into the history and culture of Southern Italy’s knife traditions, in this first chapter, I describe how I arrived at my ”personal interpretation” of the tradition. It will describe not only the journey, but also the thoughts driving it. However, the path alone is not the goal. Because the actual goal within European fencing traditions was and is to simply strike without being struck yourself, as well as the development of a personal style. Therefore I will voice some thoughts on what, in my opinion, one should pay attention to in order to avoid being too easily lethally struck. Of course, implementation  and realization is not possible overnight, and my personal research on the subject will never really be concluded.

It is difficult to foresee how something, or oneself will develop over time. Thus, my early beginnings in the art of knife fencing were extremely interesting and exciting, but also somewhat obscure. The following therefore describes my development within the Italian tradition and contains several conclusions regarding the technique, tactics and ethics of knife fighting.

It is also my aim to show that the Italian way of “commoner fencing” is more than a mere collection of techniques and tactics/strategies. These traditions not only have value as a means of defense, they also have athletic merit. Beyond that, however, they also have value as a highly cultural art form with a great degree of sophistication that is certainly comparable to the art of dancing. But most of all, these traditions are living embodiments of the philosophy of an earlier time.

 

1.2          TIKF – An Attempt at a Definition

Traditional Italian Knife Fighting (TIKF) is an umbrella term of my devising, but it is also the path to an individual fencing identity. It is impossible for me to limit myself to one school by name, since I have passed through schools of numerous regions and teachers/instructors. Sometimes these schools are so similar, nearly identical, that it only the teacher’s expression of the art, or the spirit of how it is taught that is different. I have trained in several schools like this, and it would be impossible to say that I study this one lineage or another as my official moniker, because the other schools would then lack the respect they are due. Most schools of the South did not have a formal name anyway; one merely spoke of “knife and stick” or rather of the “school of the thrust and the cut” (scuola di punta e taglio) or generally of fighting with a knife, scherma di coltello.

Finally,  it seems advantageous to me to use a name that today can be understood universally/internationally. The overall tradition is not derogated thereby since the principles, techniques and tactics of the individual systems and schools within my TIKF curriculum certainly keep their handed-down didactics and their traditional name.

My interpretation of the traditions does not concern only their technical implementation, but also their didactical, tactical-analytical and philosophical paths. Moreover I do not claim that my school is better than other traditions or systems. Traditional Italian Knife Fighting is, viewed technically and fundamentally, a synthesis of the traditions described in this book, but it is much more than that. It is an invitation to doubt constructively, to analyze using your own intellect/mind/head. And therefore TIKF is not a hybrid system, selecting out what I consider the best techniques and tactics. On the contrary, TIKF teaches all traditional schools it encompasses with the goal of having the respective student internalize, adapt and express it to his size, abilities, temperament, etc.

The advantage of this approach is that, as soon as a practitioner achieves the necessary fencing ability, or rather, when he has mentally and physically absorbed the closed system of a tradition, can continually adapt the school to his requirements. Thus he can, as the case may be, improve it. Traditions maintain a core method, philosophy and approach, but they also adapt, refine and test themselves, or else, they become a fossil. In the long run the student should not have to content himself with my choices, instead he should, assuming he wishes it, be able to develop himself freely.

Here is an example of modern adaptation in the service of preserving a traditions’ martiality. A student should train without fear of needless pain and injury. Especially in the beginning, students discover that constant pain can contribute to an inability to act freely, constantly fearing that further pain is inflicted. Based on these concerns I asked Hendrik Röber from Trinity Combat Gear to design padded dueling knives, a padded variation of the traditional wooden practice knives that are used in the South of Italy. Once technical safety has been achieved, you then can confidently go back to wood, and the occasional pain teaches, rather than inhibits. These training aids are outstanding, especially for actions directed at the weapon-bearing arm that require a great deal of practice.

Many years have passed since my initial forays on this topic, since the start of this passion and this research. I met many teachers, saw different approaches and interpretations, heard multiple stories. All these teachers (in the course of this chapter I will only name those who still influence my school or those whom I still work), as well as all my long-term students have supported me on this fencing journey. They helped me to recognize both the correct the wrong steps and how to better differentiate between the two. Above all however – and that sounds almost absurd – my journey to the Southern Italian knife schools started not in Southern Italy, the traditional home of these arts, but rather in the North of the bel paese.

 

1.3          An Excursion Into the Past

In actual fact I did not really start down this path alone. At the start, we were a small group of conspiring German enthusiasts, but because I spoke the language, I was the one who undertook most of the initial travel. My initial companions provided me with analytical, financial and moral support (because it was not always easy to find teachers, convince them to teach, or navigate old rivalries or cultural conflicts of which I was unaware). My colleagues and I met up after each trip to go over the knowledge I had gained, analyze the techniques and record it. Many of those companions who supported me with word and deed and sometimes accompanied me on my travels are still with me today.

 

1.3.1       First Steps

 “Each beginning is imbued with magic…!”

Hermann Hesse

The first trip in 2001 took me to the Province of Ravenna, where I received instruction by Antonio Merendoni, one of the first  modern researchers on the Italian tradition, and the first who recorded these arts in writing and on film. He wrote L’arte italiana del maneggio delle lame corte, dal 1350 al 1943. Storia e tecnica (The Italian art of the short blade from 1350 to 1943. History and Technique). This first teacher introduced me to the general principles, of both military and civilian knife and stick fighting. From him I received my first teaching diploma for Italian knife and stick fighting in December 2002.

Based on his lessons I changed my perspective away from the cut, for example, as is taught in many Filipino and modern styles, to focus on the thrust. He also taught me the need for well-thought-out/deliberate guards (fencing positions). Ultimately, Merendoni changed my perspective in regards to the required scope and structure of a system: he guided me away from a technical to a methodical-tactical orientation. Somehow those years had something romantic about them. We were pioneers, virtually plowing along on our own.

 

1.3.2       Genoa, Liguria

In 2006, my next stop was Genovese stick and knife fight, the bastone genovese. I was taught by Claudio Parodi, the last remaining Maestro of that tradition, and author of the book Bastone genovese, coltello e gambetto. I, too, am now a licensed a teacher of this art. The tradition from Genoa was important to me because I was born not far from there, and it was therefore an art from the land of my ancestors. Consequently, my mentor in that tradition was also the first real traditional fencing teacher who taught me. Didactically, however, there was no appreciable difference between my initial experiences in Ravenna and this tradition from Genoa. Both teachers structured their lessons in a similar manner and with a consistency, logic and simplicity that had been unknown to me until then.

 

1.3.3       Manfredonia, Apulia

Maestro Salvatore D’Ascanio

That same year the opportunity arose to study the Apulian fencing school of knife and stick from Manfredonia. This South-Italian tradition, does not actually have a specific name, but is called by some the School of the Knights of Humility Cavalieri di Umilita) and by others Fioretto (foil), was my introduction to the secretive and also more complex methodology and didactics of the southern traditions. In regards to the Manfredonian school, I was able to gain experience with diverse instructors, and experienced different interpretations of a single art, revealing a more differentiated picture of what was the core of the art, and what was individual preference. I built my foundation by training with a small group of conspiratorial enthusiasts. After that, I went to one of the traditional knife families still residing in Manfredonia today, where I received further instruction. This branch is based on the teachings of the deceased Maestro U Sardun.

Here I would like to pay homage to Maestro Salvatore D’Ascanio, who had enormous influence on my development in the techniques of this tradition. Maestro D’Ascanio improved my dynamics, and taught me how to differentiate the core elements (mechanical and aesthetic) of this school from surface differences. Simply put, he was the one who conclusively decoded the subtleties of the Manfredonian tradition in its entirety for me (see Chapter 6), even though we will see that this branch deviates somewhat from the previous ones in technique, didactics and terminology. And this is an important lesson as well: sometimes what seems like a branch is closer to the roots of a tradition than its trunk.

 

1.3.4 Sicily and the A.S.A.M.I.R.

Maestro Orazio Barbagallo, ASAMIR

A few years later, the chance arose to learn the Sicilian fencing schools of the knife and stick within the ASAMIR. Initially, I received instruction in the shepherd’s stick of the Scuola Fiorata (“Flowery School”) from Calatabiano. This caused me to question my view of a “proper cover”. Maestro Orazio Barbagallo, founder of ASAMIR and my mentor in regards to Sicilian culture, was an excellent source for the old tradition of the Scuola Ruotata (“Circling School”) from Riposto. He was the first person to open the door to the Sicilian schools, and to this day he is my teacher in the traditional Circling School of the shepherd’s stick, as he learned it from the Maestro degli Maestri (“Master of Masters” or grandmaster), U Scapellinu. Thanks to him, I was able to get to the roots of this tradition, as he put me in contact with Maestro Salvatore Scarcella, an icon of the Corto Ruotato Tradizionale from Riposto (Circling Knife School, see Chapter 7). Maestro Scarcella is a teacher who, with a single movement of his armed hand, can demonstrate at exactly the right moment how and why your actions were ineffective. He was the first who showed me that a simple thrust is more than it appears. It is due to him that I became familiar with the true Sicilian knife. Maestro Scarcella has six decades of fencing experience and clearly demonstrates that.

 

1.3.5       Canosa, Apulia

Almost parallel to my Sicilian training I began learning the peasant tradition of defense with knife and stick, the system of heaven and marvels, Cielo e Meraviglia, from Canosa in Apulia. I trained with one of the few remaining masters of this art (see Chapter 8). He made accessible to me this system of close-quarter combat with the knife, which appears lost, or rather less trusted and emphasized, in the fencing schools focused on dueling conventions. This special form of “wrestling with a knife” exhibits some clear connections to medieval dagger fencing, illustrating the technically close relationship with European fencing masters from centuries long passed. Therefore, the many system-specific, close-quarter combat bindings improved my ability to quickly turn a conflict from defense into offense without having to act from wide measure.

 

 

1.4          The Pillars of the Structure

As we will see, every fencing school focused on knife dueling uses the same progression: First you learn the school (scuola), the basic movements, in strictly set lessons, also called “figures” or “thrusts” (lezione, figure, puntate). Depending on the tradition, these individual lessons sometimes develop into extended solo forms. This is followed by the “schooling” or “instruction” (insegnamento), where the basic solo movements are now practiced with a partner. The insegnamento also includes, tactics, tricks as and use of the strategic use of the various fencing guards. This traditional procedure has, of course, been adopted in TIKF and is part of how we insure the core spirit and method of the art is preserved.

In addition, instruction in my school consists of the ”didactic trinity”: Play, Defense and Attack (trinità diddattica: gioco, difesa e attacco; but this is a neologism, not a traditional term). First, the student learns the system-specific “play of the figures”, which consist of the basic movements necessary for changing positions. Then follows the specific defenses with the blade and the empty hand from the “play of the figures”. After that, the student is introduced to the various basic attacks and tricks that also occur out of “walking the circle”. The last step connects the three key points – play, defense and attack – so that one flows into the next, or rather, so that there is no longer a clear dividing line: A defense becomes an attack, just like an attack becomes a defense; a circular or spiraling movement is used for defense and attack, and the  attacks and defenses are applications forms of the circular walking.

However, this goal can only be reached through simplification and pragmatism. Here I follow a guideline from Nietzsche, which he expressed as follows in his Anti-Christ:

“The formula for happiness: a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal.”

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Being Old School: An Interview with Ellis Amdur on the Classical Martial Arts of Japan

llis Amdur has pursued the study of East Asian martial traditions since the late 1960s. He is a licensed instructor in two koryū (classical Japanese martial traditions), the Araki-ryu Torite-Kogusoku and the Toda-ha Buko-ryu. The Araki-ryu is a rugged system that specializes in close combat. It could be termed, “grappling with weapons.” The Toda-ha Buko-ryu specializes in the use of the naginata, a long pole-arm with a curved blade against a variety of weapons. Details about this school, including dojo locations and entry requirements can be found at the Toda-ha Buko-ryu website. Over the years, he has trained in a number of other martial systems, most notably Aikido, Judo, Brazilian jiujitsu.and xingyi chu’an (studying varying lengths of time with Su Dong Chen, Chris Bates and Zhang Yun).  Aside from his ongoing koryū training, Amdur has most recently been training in two new areas: the basics of Arrestling, under the instruction of Don Gulla and many other seniors in the system, and a focus on principle-based training regarding integration of the body so that it is used most efficiently, something he discusses in detail in his book, Hidden in Plain Sight.

However it is in regards to the koryū that he is best known, and he included considerable detail about these two schools, as well as a number of others, in his ground-breaking book, Old School: Essays on Japanese Martial Traditions (2002). Now, over a decade later, he returns to the subject with a new, expanded edition, nearly half again the size of the original. Ellis took some time to discuss common misunderstandings about  koryū, challenges in maintaining and transmitting archaic martial traditions in the modern world, and even a few thoughts about the growing movement in redeveloping Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) from the perspective of an inheritor of two, living martial traditions.

Ellis Amdur practicing Toda-ha Buko Ryu, a centuries-old school of Japanese martial arts focusing on the use of the naginata, or glaive.

Q:  Over the last two decades, far more westerners have discovered Japanese koryū, and in many cases have begun studying some of these traditions, but for those who are not “initiates” into such a tradition, what really makes the “old schools” different from modern budō such as aikidō, judō or kendō besides antiquity?

In a way, the difference  between koryū  and modern budō  is a complete inversion. Arts like judō are vast, world-wide endeavors that are, at least in broad terms, the same whether you are in Japan, the United States or South America. By contrast, koryū  are small, group endeavors, passed down in  a lineal fashion of master-apprentice. They exist as small islands in a larger sea of martial endeavor. Furthermore, each ryū is far more technically distinct than the variations between different factions of aikidō or karate.

But the  differences go beyond the mechanics of the art to an ideological mindset, that exists in a totality that simply isn’t found in modern budō . Koryū  are a kind of surrogate family — a student knows all of the instructors of the art, and the headmaster of the entire school often knows every student within the school. By contrast, people in modern  budō  may be passionate about their art, they may love their local dojo or teacher, but they usually don’t feel a fierce, family loyalty to judō  itself. Belonging to a koryū  is a hermetic activity in the sense that members are expected to keep some aspects of the school, even most, private and secret. There remains an us-against-them mentality that existed once upon a time when these arts were used in real life and death struggle, played out on the Japanese socio-political stage. This former rivalry persists in a set of rules and traditions that at their core are not about self-growth, personal development or well-being, but in the idea of the initiate being loyal to their school above all else. This is congruent with Japanese culture, which was a culture of martial service, where its greatest heroes were those who did their duty, at great personal cost. This difference of refinement of self versus service to one’s art, underlies everything that distinguishes, for example, Kano’s judō  from the classical jujutsu schools it grew from.

Q: If an outsider reads various budō forums there is so much discussion about certain recurring questions about koryū these days, one gets the impression of a vigorous, vast community of traditional martial artists in Japan. What is the reality — do you consider Japan’s traditional arts “endangered”, “stable” or “growing”? 

All of them! As flippant as that sounds, it is really true, because in a certain sense, what makes a traditional school “successful” or “endangered” has to be evaluated school by school. The idea of a monolithic category of traditional arts is an illusion. Arts from different periods have different characters, just as much as they do different techniques. Some of the oldest arts were threatened centuries ago, when Japan entered the long peace of the Edo period. Despite the idea of koryū  as “warfare” arts, there are maybe 20 arts today that have any relevance to archaic, battlefield combat; the rest were either born in the generations after Tokugawa reunited the country, or went through so much evolution and adaptation during that era that their curriculum reflects the concerns of civilian combat and dueling, not warfare.

Compared to modern martial arts, there are few in Japan that train in the koryū , fewer that teach, and even fewer that can understand the mindset tied to these arts, even among the fully licensed instructors. So in this sense the koryū  are endangered. On the other hand, one of Japan’s strongest  values is it’s treasuring of tradition, so there are always those who will be interested in something old. That gives a certain stability to archaic arts that we don’t have in the West.

What really endangers koryū  is the need for personal transmission. When I said that koryū  as a category can be said to be growing and endangered at the same time, I could say this of individual koryū  as well! When the numbers get big, paradoxically, that does not mean that the art is doing well, because — although the students may  be learning the techniques they are not receiving the tradition, only a simulacrum of it. When you are a member of a martial organization, with a teacher whom you see once a year, who may or may not even speak your language, nor you his, then you are in a sense studying about a koryū  but are not really studying a koryū  itself — the method of transmission and the intimacy of the school is lost. How different ryu have responded to this challenge is a part of what I touch on in this new edition of the book.

Kata, or set forms, are the central practice of training with weapons in Japanese koryu.

Q: There are also certain recurring replies by those within one of these schools: “it is impossible to understand the difference if you are not a member of a tradition”, “ask your sensei”, “koryū can’t really be transmitted outside of Japan” and so forth. As something of a notorious martial iconoclast, if there was any one thing you would say that insiders don’t “get” about what makes the koryū what they are, what is it?

Let’s answer that by elaborating what they are NOT;  you don’t  join a school and learn the choreography of a sword fight. The kata are pattern drills, and those forms sometimes have more to do with how to organize the  body, how to develop a specific physical or mental attribute, rather than a simple technique detailing “if he does this, then you do that”.  Sometimes a given element is so important that the kata may not look very martial, even sloppy or stupid to an outsider, but what it is developing has nothing to do with a replica of “combat”, but to train a specific attribute.

Honestly, I don’t see why this is so controversial today. No one would suggest that the ideal way to train with firearms is to load live rounds, put on vests and shoot at each other! Instead we use a combination of range work, obstacle course-style training and mock-guns that allow the experience of shooting at each other, but are not the same as using real guns in a gunfight. The reality of training with weapons is to make either the weapons or the environment as realistic as you can make it, while keeping the psychological component intact. And different training highlights different aspects of the totality of the skill that you are trying to achieve.  Combative training must rely on some form of pattern drill, or the mock weapons are supplemented with so much safety gear that the students no longer behave like people in a real fight.

This is even more necessary and true today, when we not only lack the experience of teachers who have used these archaic weapons in mortal combat, because our bodies simply lack the physicality of strength and flexibility of a pre-industrial society. A man who walks and rides horses as his only means of transportation; who chops his own wood and works in a barefoot crouch for hours at a time, simply has a different musculature, a different plasticity to his tendons then a modern man who works at a desk. The kata were designed for the former man, where literally every waking moment was preparation of the body in a way that we can only mimic with supplemental exercise today.

So some of the kata of koryū  can be a disappointment as one realizes that rather than engaging in samurai live-action role-play, you may spend years learning patterns that are not only teaching archaic weapons and methods, but also archaic ways of coordinating one’s body.

Let me put it this way: You want to join a koryū ? Prepare to not only work hard, but to be bored while you are doing it. It comes with the territory.

Q: It has been over a decade since you published the first edition of OLD SCHOOL, and at various point and times you have said that you felt you’d written all you had to say on Japanese koryū. So what made you change your mind, and why return to the subject now?

Well, I’ve been training! I still consider my own training on the upward slope — even as parts of my body have broken down with age, I’ve been able to do a great deal of pressure testing my own tradition’s kata, and I simply have learned more. The other thing is that I have continued to research on an academic level — and there is a lot of  wonderful new research coming out in the Japanese martial arts. Most people’s understanding of koryū  and modern budō  in context comes from the pioneering work of Donn Draeger, that marvelous giant of a man. Don was truly a ground-breaker, but he was not terribly fluent in Japan and was too reliant on the work of others, and on looking at the arts through the specific lens of traditions he studied. He made a specific perspective general. Others now are reassessing his conclusions. Michael Wert, Karl Friday, William Bodiford — these are trained scholars who can read primary documents and are high level practitioners. What they, among others, have revealed has really transformed my own understanding and a made a reevaluation worthwhile.

“The Battle of Uji Bridge” — A brilliant example of the dynamic illustration of combat in feudal Japanese artwork.

Q: The obvious question: what’s new and different about this expanded edition?

It really is a virtually new work, with five new chapters, a lot of new illustrations, and I’ve re-written several chapters not just in additional content, but changed viewpoints as well. For example, by the mid-Edo period, the bulk of the membership in martial ryu were not from the warrior class. For many, the ryu could be viewed much like parvenus today joining a golf or tennis club to acquire social capital. I write about the rise of competitive martial sports in the 17th century and rather than merely supporting the claim that this represented degeneration, take the position that this was a response to, what was, in many cases, a stagnation of older combative practices that were now “as-if” rather than practical utility.

I’m not sure on word count, but I think we concluded that somewhere over a third of the book is absolutely new.   Other chapters are radically revised—some folks who have used my work to buttress their own opinions may find that my current work puts them in opposition to me.  I think the “expanded” part is well-justified!

Q: A great deal of the OLD SCHOOL EXPANDED EDITION deals with the challenge of transmission — of maintaining  both tradition, form and martial vigor to something that now lives outside its original cultural context. Obviously a great deal of this is reliant upon the power of living tradition — direct transmission from master to student. But are their pitfalls inherent to a reliance on direct transmission as well?

Although many of my peers would disagree with me, I see studying with a teacher koryū  to be a kind of struggle, not submission. Intimacy is the revelation of self — for better or worse you will be revealed to your teacher, and your teacher to yourself. Part of the learning is the struggle of learning not what you want, but what the teacher desires, and further, what the tradition itself demands. This entails learning to differentiate between your teacher’s human flaws vs. the value of the school itself. There is a dynamic, creative struggle that is a parallel to the nature of conflict itself. If you are loyal to the teacher, it is hard to go outside of their aegis to learn, and if they have any flaws, be they technical or personal, the product you inherit is flawed as well. Once upon a time, the solution was that young bloods would break off and form new schools, revamping what they thought wrong, missing or incomplete in their former instruction — this is how we have so many branches of Ittō Ryu or Yoshin Ryu. With many schools, the kata will seem almost identical, technically, but there may be a difference in the tactics, in ways of generating power or subtleties of movement. These reveal how that off-shoot differed from what its parent taught. Obviously, when these arts were contemporary, the proof could be in the testing: something new that wasn’t very good wasn’t prone to survival.

But today, these arts are archaic, and have been for generations. There was a time that some students would master multiple schools over a life time; now individuals study 30, 40, 50 years without every receiving a menkyo kaiden in one! Instead of young masters fighting and old masters teaching refinement and subtlety, now old masters are revered as some sort of supermen — this is ludicrous. Their knowledge may be great, but age is age, and youth and  vigor cannot be ignored in combat. We mystify older teachers and all too-often they mystify themselves. There can manifest as a grasping greed of the elderly, where they simply cannot, and will not let go. It is a new phenomenon, that leads to a real risk of calcification. Honestly, all too often in Japan, I’ve encountered something analogous to an old bull who colludes with the farmer (Japanese culture and tradition) to keep the young bulls away from the cows. But there’s a real potential that his seed gets weaker and his offspring mere shadows of what their ancestors were.

Furthermore, there is a real cultural tension created because you can’t really go outside the art to refine, recreate or reinvigorate it without already possessing a full license. If you do so, you will be viewed as disloyal, even betraying the tradition. You may be fully qualified, but kept from a license which would give you the freedom to revivify the tradition.

A pair of tengu (winged, mountain spirits) collide in mid-air. As tengu were often credited with teaching martial arts to mortals, the colliding messengers makes a nice metaphor for the challenge in balancing tradition with stultification that challenges proper transmission within the koryu.

Q: So is innovation really even still possible within a “traditional art”?

There is a creative tension within koryū , within the nature of encoding a form and grasping them within our body — the idea of gokui — that then allows you to change and alter the form itself. Until quite recently, koryū  were quite willing to innovate. In some schools, that goes up to the present: innovating or even going into their own records to revise portions of the school were lost.

If a person truly has the essence of the school, it is possible, even today, to add or refine not only the inherited kata but the training methodology.  Improving archaic weapon morphology is obviously questionable; but what if a portion of the art is relevant today? That opens interesting questions. Some would say koryū  are a kind of living history — it would be wrong to change the essence of the school; while others might say that we are studying a living entity with historical roots.

Here is an example from my own experience. In my line of Araki ryu, training in sojutsu — spearmanship — is extremely challenging, because the spears are struck with a great deal of force. As a result, if you really do the kata as they are mandated, you break spears constantly. In pre-industrial Japan, so what? Give a woodworker a few coins and let him carve you a bundle of new ones. But today a good, tapered training spear can be $300….so there is a real problem with breaking one every time you train. As a result, what you see are students — and teachers — modifying the technique to go easy on the training weapons. Now, instead of the tool being in service to the form, the kata is in service to the tool! A solution I have been investigating is to have spears made of extruded nylon. These are virtually indestructible, no matter how hard I hit it with a bokken, but nylon is hardly “traditional”. Is this really a problem, or is it using a modern solution to allow students to fight as the technique is meant to be done without obsessing over protecting the weapon?

I understand why this solution might really trouble some people, but it depends, in my opinion, on the ryu and what its character mandates. For Araki-ryū, where the transmission suffers without constant challenge—where we are expected to be iconoclastic—I think it is a viable answer to a serious problem. In my other art, Toda-ha Bukō-ryū, where we do not use spears like this, and the kata are not suffering, it would  be a modern innovation that serves no good purpose. Remember what I said earlier — the idea of monolithic  traditional arts is an illusion.

Q: Is that possible? After all, if you change a kata, add one or drop one, aren’t you altering the tradition? Likewise, if a part of an art — say its short-sword curriculum — is no longer practiced, is it possible for a determined teacher to “restore” it?

My colleague Liam Keeley wrote about this some time ago in the journal Hoplos, and he came up with different levels of restoration. I am not quite sure that the terminology I am about to use is a perfect match, but I think it is close enough to convey the idea.

RECOVERY — In this case, a teacher may still fully know an aspect of the school, but for some reason, has chosen not to teach it. For example, perhaps a weapon school decides that they already teach the longsword and the tanto (knife), and  the few short sword kata they possess are redundant or unnecessary. Sometimes, dedicated students will approach other master-level teachers of the previous generation, or perhaps the soke himself, and request they be taught those kata, and the teacher decides “well, if they are interested, why not?” If those students move on to become teachers and the material passes on, then something that could have been lost has been recovered. So in a sense this is like “rescuing” a portion of an art from death.

RECONSTITUTION forms the next level. In this case a portion of the curriculum was abandoned and did not live into the next generation. However, there are living teachers who have the ability and skill to take surviving documentation and rework and redevelop these kata. Using my previous example, in this case the short sword kata would have not been transmitted, but would still exist in detailed written explanation. So perhaps the headmaster, or a teacher or teachers that he appoints, looks at that documentation and based on their knowledge of the longsword and the tanto begin to reconstruct and teach those kata again. Will the reconstituted kata be precisely the same as what was taught before? That is unknowable, but they should still be martially valid and fit the essential principles of the school. I have written about this in detail in a chapter in one of Meik and Diane Skoss’ books, entitled, “Renovation and Innovation in Koryū.”

RECREATION means that there is a lost section of the school or there is an attempt to create something new that the school is said to have possessed before, but for which there is no clear documentation. The result can be anything from horrid to sublime. Let’s say that a koryū has lost all of its edged weapon syllabus, and is now  a jujutsu school (Sanshin Araki-ryū is an example of this). They simply may not know enough about swordsmanship to recreate the kata, even if they have detailed records. Sometimes, schools will “import” methods or whole kata from another ryu. If the schools are a good stylistic match, maybe this can work, but often you are grafting a bird’s wings to a lion’s back and getting some sort of chimera that may undermine the entire thing.

REINVENTION also takes place in Japan. There are many schools that have died out, but their documentation survives. Reinvention is taking something dead and using written records alone to recreate it. The results vary on the quality and prior knowledge of the reinventor.  Martially, the results may be viable or effective. But is it really the same school, or something new? Do the reinventors really “have it” from the inside out? They can’t — it’s dead, and a fossil is not a dinosaur. They do not have the essential teachings that were the life-blood of the school, things that are usually transmitted not only orally, but through crossed weapons or body-to-body.  And honestly, what’s the point? Why revive an extinct naginata school, for example, when there are perfectly viable extant schools that one could join, and pay one’s dues, earning a level of true expertise. It’s like going to the museum and climbing onto a stuffed horse to ride, when next door, there are stables full of quarterhorses and Appaloosas.

THE COLLECTOR is a fifth level that I add to Liam’s categorization, and is somewhat aside from the others. There are many dying schools in Japan, now held by one or two elderly teachers who find themselves without  students. Such lonely old men and women will be “befriended” by someone whose principle goal is to then be granted a teaching license to pad their martial resumes. Such men often have multiple schools that they “lead” or hold a high teaching rank, and they have photos with these elderly teachers and antique scrolls to prove their legitimacy. But the truth is that they have often learned virtually nothing, and whatever they may have  been shown was from a teacher doing his or her best with a failing body, mind or both, to convey a little of what he had inherited. The Collector, therefore isn’t really a part of the tradition, nor are they seeking to restore or reinvent for the art’s sake, but for their own egos.

The challenge of transmission within any archaic martial art can be frought with peril, not least when it is cross-generational and cross-cultural. Above: a small cadre of students keep alive the dynamic Noda-ha Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu

Q: So how does someone like yourself, an inheritor of two of these transmissions with an obligation to pass on their legacy, make sure that the art’s essence, and not just its form, is passed forward?

If I am not absolutely clear that the essence will be passed on, then it dies with me. And I am perfectly content with that. You can’t turn a dog into a wolf, and if I cannot find any wolves, I won’t replace them with carrion eaters.  And btw, passing it on does not mean that student does everything the way I do. One of my Toda-ha Bukō-ryū students, Steve Bowman, has indeed become a shihan — teacher — in his own right (this, by the way, makes him a former student, because one “graduates” when one becomes a shihan). Were you to observe him, however, you might be a little puzzled, because he does not move like me. Yet one of his own students, who had met with me maybe four times, was immediately spotted by another Toda-ha Bukō-ryū as a student as “in my lineage.” Steve doesn’t move like me, but he passed on the essence of what I taught him in such a way that one of his students, who is built similar to me, does essentially do what I’ve taught.  I don’t require that my students think like me, or are a mirror of me technically, but they perceive and  embody  the essence of the tradition..

Q: These question are interesting not only to other students of budō, but to our many readers who are devoted student-scholars of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) — the fighting arts of Europe from the Middle Ages to the early Modern era. These are not living traditions, but have had to be painstakingly reconstructed from highly-detailed  books and manuscripts of the period. Some students and instructors of traditional martial arts roll their eyes at this effort and say “this is a fool’s errand; you can’t resurrect the dead”, while a number of HEMA people argue, “this may be true, but these are the direct teachings of the men who fought and died with these arts, so there is no garbling of the lesson through generations of oral transmission.” As someone who has clearly devoted a large part of his life to living tradition martial arts, but who also argues for the need to reevaluate and reassess what you’ve inherited, what are your thoughts?

First of all, high dudgeon about this is sort of silly. In a Japanese context, I often share bemusement when someone says that they want to recreate, say, a lost kusarigama or grappling school. Why would you do that when you can go to a teacher of a living school of those arts and help ensure they are passed on? But in a case like, say, the European longsword, it’s different. No such teacher exists. So if one’s passion is towards the ethos of the longsword, then what I called reinvention is their only choice. We only have so many years to live, and so many hours we are given to find happiness. If trying to study and restore a lost martial lineage fills your hours with joy, great.

However, the idea that having original sources uncontaminated by “later generations” is somehow more pure is silly. I am a third generation, American Jewish guy from Pittsburgh who has 600 years of Euro-American tradition separating me from anything that happened in Europe in the 14th century. The same social, political and cultural changes that made the longsword extinct are what shaped the ethos that produced me. So without a surviving tradition, I am even further cut off from that earlier world. Beyond this —  you don’t know what you don’t know. So much in any culture is oral, so how do we know what is missing.

We can’t help but be contaminated by what we learn from other martial arts or our own external experiences. You have to accept that you cannot achieve the same things that can be drawn from a living transmission.  These are the subtle things that make a particular tradition unique, and they can only be learned body-to-body. Living tradition is not just a series of documents passed hand-to-hand. It’s body-to-body knowledge, most of which is not documented. That is not meant in arrogant or hubristic way, vis-à-vis European martial arts revival, but this sort of internal gearing is what generational transmission can maintain but print cannot record. I am not questioning that people can’t come up with some fascinating information. Absolutely. But I believe that if I wanted to learn fencing and I found someone who studied with a student of Aldo Naldi, the information I can receive will very likely be richer, more nuanced and deeper than what I could learn mining texts of people who are not linked to me in a hand-to-hand, body-to-body way.

Q. If there was a single objective, or a single lesson you wished to impart with OLD SCHOOL, what is it? 

That this subject is far more complex, far more exciting and far more challenging than people imagine. The lovely thing about koryū  is that it is no one thing but many things, with as many appearances, practices and objectives as there are schools. Once we get past the idea that we are all swinging archaic weapons, and are therefore all doing roughly the same activities,  things can change radically from tradition to tradition. When we embody the movements of someone 300 years lost who used these movements in the struggle of life and death, this is the closest we can get to shamanic “skin walking” in another body. For a few moments we can taste a different world, that can be completely alien to all our own.

Q. So what next? With this new edition do you feel you’ve said your fill on traditional Japanese martial arts, or is there more to come?

Well, right now I have just had a graphic novel released, via Amazon Kindle and on ComiXology, that I co-authored with Neal Stephenson, Mark Teppo and Charles Man. It is called Cimarronin: A Samurai in New Spain.  This is from the blurb: Kitazume, a disgraced outcast samurai living in early seventeenth-century Manila, is contemplating ritual suicide when a rogue Jesuit priest and Kitazume’s longtime friend persuades him to help smuggle a Manchu princess to Mexico. But little does he know that he’s really been dragged into an epic struggle for power. Several forces have their malicious sights set on the New World’s rich silver mines: an insurgent Spanish duke, Chinese political interests, and the escaped African slaves known as the cimarrónes.

Among other things, I am responsible for overseeing the fight scenes, along with some consultants specific to one or another character, and have tried to make them realistic to 1650, and to the various cultures. There is a great chance of fleshing out the hero’s backstory, if the original two story arcs sell well, as well as further sequels, so everyone buy it, please!. I also have a novel called the Girl With the Face of the Moon that was just released on December 30^th, via Amazon Kindle.  And this from that blurb: A young woman of samurai lineage is raised in an impoverished mountain village by bitter parents, identical to the peasants among whom they live, but for their ancestry. Unloved and mistreated, she runs off with a Matagi, a man of a caste of hunters, who were outcast but nearly free from the rules that governed the rest of Japanese society. After a few years of happiness, their child is stolen by a being perhaps human, perhaps not. Bereft, the young woman will challenge death itself to recover her child. 

The Girl with the Face of the Moon is set in Bakumatsu and Meiji Japan, a transitional period in the mid-1800’s, when Japan went from Medieval to Modern in only a few years. This, however, is not a book about the privileged few; rather, this is a story of those on the fringes: a blind wandering masseuse, the abalone divers, the aboriginal mountain folk, a wild yojimbo (body guard and bar thug both), the hunters who worship bears, seeing them as the true power of the mountains, and a woman with no place in any of Japan’s societies.

The Girl with the Face of the Moon is a combination of two of the oldest stories of humanity, the hero’s journey and the tale of revenge:  a mother seeking to save her child from hell.  The description of the hero’s training and that of her allies are based on historical figures and the actual training methods and techniques of archaic Japanese martial arts, something the author learned, first hand, for thirteen years in Japan.  Threaded throughout is the terrible question how one can retain one’s humanity, and even further, what happens to love, in a world of pervasive terror. 

So, I’ve been busy! But I have also thought of creating a new work on koryu. What I am imagining doing is taking people’s questions and challenges, and providing thoroughly researched answers in a series of essays like Old School itself. So it occurs to me that there might be one last work in me yet in regards to this amazing, odd world, but its exact form is yet to be known.

 

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Razmafzar – Persian Martial Arts Alive and Well – An Interview with Manouchehr Mostagh Khorasani

 martial artist, linguist, historian and tireless arms and armour researcher, Dr. Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani (Germany) is an award-winning author who won the prestigious awards of the Book Prize of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2012) for his book Lexicon of Arms and Armor from Iran: A Study of Symbols and Terminology and Arms and Armor from Iran: The Bronze Age to the End of the Qajar Period(2009), which also won the World Book Prize in the field of Iranian Studies in 2009. The latter book is based on over 800 primary and secondary sources and features a detailed analysis of over 520 artifacts from ten Iranian museums for the first time. Some selected items from private collections are also featured in this book.

Dr. Khorasani is also the author of the book Antique Oriental and Arab Weapons and Armour: The Streshinskiy Collection (published 2010) and has written well over 100 print articles, lexicon entries and book contributions related to arms and armor from Iran in 30 print journals and magazines, an encyclopedia and one in a book in English, German, Spanish, French and Persian for American, Argentinian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, Indian, Iranian, South Korean and Spanish magazines.

We have known Dr. Khorasani for many years in his role as a moderator and consultant at Swordforum International, and were particularly excited when we learned that he had been combining all of his passions and backgrounds in a new project: Razmafzar – Persian Martial Arts. His latest book, Persian Archery and Swordsmanship: The Martial Arts of Iran, is the first publication of his results, another massive, meticulously documented analysis of artifacts, artwork, and literature, this time cross-analyzed with surviving Persian fencing, archery and riding manuscripts and the many living-traditions of Iranian wrestling. We are pleased to offer this interview, where Dr. Khorasani gives us some insights into the (re)development of Razmafzar, living martial traditions in Iran, and what is forthcoming from his prolific pen.

QUESTIONS:

Shamshir and Separ (Buckler) vs Mace and Buckler. In Razmafzar the small shield (separ) is used with a variety of weapons, including the sword, mace, axe and dagger.

FAP: In the simplest terms, what is “Razmafzar”? Where does the name originate? What fighting disciplines does it entail?

Khorasani: This is a combined Persian term, a New Persian lexeme which consists of razm (battle/fight) and afzar (tools/weapons). It means “Battle Weapons”. Actually, this word is related to zinabzar or zinafzar which means the weapons for a mounted warrior. The term zinafzar can already be found in the Poems of Onsori Balkhi (1990, p.22). This word is an old word which derives from the Middle Persian word zēn afzār (war implements/weapons) that can be found in Karnameye Ardeshir Babakan (see Farahvashi, 2007, p. 30). The reason for choosing razmafzar and not zinafzar for this historical martial art is that it deals not only with cavalry techniques and tactics but also with infantry techniques and tactics. So it is a more general term encomassing both fields. Although the fomer has received some cursory look, the latter has been completely ignored in the studies of martial hertitage of Iran/Persia. It entails all techniques which are documented in manuscripts, poems, battlefield accounts, miniatures, arts, stone reliefs from Ancient Iran and also Islamic period of Iran.

FAP: You had already established your reputation as a researcher into Persian arms and armour? How did you come to turn your attention to Persian fighting arts?

Khorasani: I have been an active martial artist almost all my life and surely after years of research, measurement and recording hundreds of Iranian arms and armor in 14 museums in Iran and many private collections in Europe, Russia and USA, the intriguing question has always been how these weapons were used. That is why I turned my attention to a detailed study of these weapons.

FAP: One of the unique things in Persian Archery and Swordsmanship is your detail to language – in tracking a lexicon of martial terminology or technical vocabulary, that can be found in non technical literature and then comparing that to iconographic depictions of the same actions. This is an area that is still awaiting more serious attention in Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). Can you discuss the process you used in going about this?

Khorasani: Thanks for asking this question. I started my research first by writing a book on classification of Iranian weapons from Ancient Iran up to the end of the Qajar period in 1925. The result was the publication of my book “Arms and Armor from Iran: The Bronze Age to the End of the Qajar Period” in 2006. After that I turned my attention to translating and annotating many Persian manuscripts, which have been scanned for me by Iranian museums and libraries. These included manuscripts on making Persian crucible steel (up to that time all unknown in the western world), archery manuscripts (5 of them published in my last book), manuscripts on lance, spear, swordfighting and manuscripts on war wrestling. As an English major, as I have a PhD in English language, languages and their academic study have always been a central area of concentration for my research and analysis. I have lived and studied in different countries and hence learned different languages (English, German and Spanish) as my academic fields. Therefore, I felt that I had to extend my area of research and study battlefield accounts, poems, stories and also popular tales. To my surprise, I found terms and expressions for techniques such as “shamshir bar farq zadan: To strike the top of the head”. I saw this expression in many manuscripts in many centuries. Then I analyzed miniatures and was extremely surprised to see how often this technique was used. Quite often I must say. Then other combinations followed. I went back and saw that even in Ancient Iran, this technique was used. I mean in iconogrphy of Sasanid period. Then I found how manuscripts and even poems describe this technique and how it should be applied. I made a comparative analysis. I did it for all techniques I could find in hundred manuscripts. Many of them handwritten manuscripts which were scanned. A meticulous and painstaking process. It took very long. At the end I found 5700 lexemes and then tried to find the relationship to iconographic items. First I published my lexicon “Lexicon of Arms and Armor from Iran: A Study of Symbols and Terminology” in 2010 and then my last book this year “Persian Archery and Swordsmanship: Historical Martial Arts of Iran”.

FAP: HEMA practitioners are fortunate in having a a larger number of technical works, “fight books”, on which to base their reconstruction. Is there a similar body of Persian martial texts to draw from?

Khorasani: Yes, there are. I have presented many complete manuals in my last book. Five complete ones on Persian archery. One on mounted lance fighting. One on spearfighting on foot. Three on war wrestling. One on swords. As we are talking, I have received some new ones. This area has been neglected for years. I have received new manuscripts on archery, swordsmanship, mounted combat, etc.

FAP: In the West, many traditional martial arts, particularly “aristocratic” or “chivalric” ones became extinct in the 18th and 19th centuries, and have had to be reconstructed. How does this compare to the situation in Iran? Have you been able to find living sword or weapon arts, and if so, have they played a role in creating modern Razmafzar?

Khorasani: Chivalric code of Iran is best expressed in the Javanmardi code which is similar to European chivalric code or Japanese bushido. We have a living tradition of Zurkhane (House of Strength). Wrestling in Iran is considered as a sacred sport, where the mat is still considered a place to respect and to be respected and one needs to show humbleness and also help people in need. My project of Razmafzar is based on academic reconstruction of techniques in manuscripts, miniatures and reliefs. But it does not stop there. As I have shown in my last book, the tenets and training methods of the House of Strength will be integrated in it. Additionally, we have over 24 styles of traditional wrestling in Iran, we have sword dancing, we have different stick fighting methods in Iran. They are in the process of being researched. We will make comparative analysis and then set up a big data bank and integrate them in Razmafzar as well.

Wrestling remains an important sport, fighting tradition and cultural treasure in Iranian culture even today, and was considered the basis of Persian warrior training.

FAP: At the same time, there are many European folk traditions, particularly for wrestling and stick or knife fighting, that have survived. In Persian Archery and Swordsmanship you touch on this with traditional Iranian wrestling or Varzesh Pahlavani. Can you tell us a little about Pahlavani – both as it exists now and as it might have related to earlier Persian fighting arts?

Khorasani: The House of Strength symbolizes a sacred place where practitioners not only develop strength, but they need to learn javanmardi rules. They need to be role models for the young generation. Wrestling is one of the most effective combat systems as proven again and again. This plays a major role in Iran.

FAP: Have you yourself trained in Varzesh Pahlavani yourself? Have any modern Pahlavans been interested in your work with Razmafzar?

Khorasani: Yes I am fortunate enough to be in contact with leading pahlavans in Iran and I trained and even documented their training in the House of Strength. They are greatly interested in Razmafzar.

FAP: Before you began reconstructing Razmafzar, did you already have a previous martial arts background? If so, in what? How has it helped with your redevelopment of Razmafzar?

Khorasani: Yes, without name dropping, my students and friends know that. I hold three black belts, a 4th dan in one of them, the others 2nd dan. I have trained and competed in many full-contact sports such as boxing, Muay Thai and of course wrestling. I experimented with BJJ and trained in a team. Besides I also trained in a Japanese Koryu sword art extensively. But I have always wrestled and love this sport. Wrestling has helped me the most, as this is the tenet of Persian armored and unarmored fight. But I have to say that all martial arts and fighting I have done have played a part, by helping me universal principles of combat, like distance and lines of attack and defence. I have to say I love realistic and full-contact sparring and think that is important in all martial arts, including swordfighting.

A Persian warrior should be able to grab and throw in close range at anytime. And then of course to deliver fast and powerful blows with his weapons.

FAP: Persia has long been a cross-roads between the Mid and Far east. Have you found commonalities between Persian arts with those of the Arabs to the West or Indians, such as the Sikh Gatka or Shastar Vidiya to the East?

Khorasani: Well possibly, but as I have not trained in Indian or Arab arts, I cannot pass judgments. What I can say is that there always commonalities with certain arts, especially when the arms and armour are similar, but I would say that what I know defines Persian arts is an emphasis on developing strength, stamina, power and only then techniques. This is why wrestling plays a crucial role – it trains the body that is at the core of the entire art. A Persian warrior should be able to grab and throw in close range at anytime. And then of course to deliver fast and powerful blows with his weapons.

FAP: You have chosen to create an international research and development team to develop Razmafzar. Can you tell us a bit about who comprises the team and how your team works together?

Khorasani: I have a very dedicated team and I am in constant contact with them. My team comprises of three different groups. Researchers who write and do research on historical arms and armor from Iran, the other section comprises experienced martial artists and another who work and help in the realm of public relations and also editorial process. To enter my group and be marked as a member one needs to fulfill certain criteria. I am really proud of the members of Razmafzar team and many thanks for asking me questions about them. These are:

1) Mr. Bede Dwyer from Australia is a leading researcher on Asian composite bow. Bede has published many articles in many leading academic journals. He plays a very important role in Razmafzar team. He has been my editor from 2004 and has made useful comments on archery sections on my books. We have written many important articles on Persian archery based on Persian archery manuscripts which have been translated by me. At the moment, I am planning to write a book on Persian archery together with Mr. Bede Dwyer on Persian archery. This book will not only comprise archery techniques and annotated archery texts but we will show techniques and how to execute them with a replica Persian composite bow.

2) Mr. Ali Ghourchani from Iran is an accomplished horse archer who has gained many places in international horse archery competitions. I will test many horseback wrestling and horseback lance and swordfighting in cooperation with Ali. He is an accomplished horse archer.

3) Mr. Heiko Grosse from Germany is an accomplished swordsman who has been training and learning razmafzar under my direct supervision. He is a black belt in kendo with ten years experience in Kendo competitions and a Cateran and an expert in Scottish swordsmanship with five-year experience. He plays a pivotal role in learning and teaching Razmafzar.

4) Ms. Mitra Haji is a Museum Curator of Bonyad Museums from Tehran, Iran. I have been working with Ms. Haji over 7 years. I have analyzed over 500 historical arms and armor from Iran which are kept in Bonyad Museum. She has translated and edited many of my articles in Persian. We organized two historical arms and armor exhibitions “The Power of Iranian Steel” and “Weapons and Combat in the Shahname” in Tehran.

5) Mr. Mark McMorrow from the USA is the executive editor and director of Swordforum International, the biggest online community dedicated to the study of historical arms and armor. Mark plays a very important role in making Razmafzar public and we have an excellent working relationship together,

6) Mr. Richard Nable is a police Lieutenant for a metropolitan police department in the Southeastern United States. He is a SWAT sniper and team leader, department rangemaster, and instructor primarily in police weapons, tactics and survival. Richard is our advisor on the mechanisms of historical firearms and has edited a number of articles on historical firearms which I have written and also has been editing parts of my books.
7) Mr. Greg Thomas Obach has been on my team for over 12 years. Greg is a leading and very experienced smith who makes wonderful crucible steel. He has edited the chapters on crucible steel in my books and also articles. His insights into making crucible steel and above all his down-to-earth approach and willingness to learn and experiment make him truly a unique smith.

8) Ms. Venous Pirmomen from Iran is an archaeologist with a Master and a Bachelor degree in archaeology from Islamic Azad University. Her areas of interest and concentration are bio-archaeology, biological anthropology and forensic anthropology. She has played an important role in accessing data for research of Razmafzar team and public relations in Iranian universities. She has found many new manuscripts from Iranian libraries and museums for primary research materials on Persian arms and armor.

9) Mr. Hessamoddin Shafeianis a PhD Candidate at University of California, Riverside in the field of Electrical Engineering Department. He obtained his MSc degree from the prestigeous Sharif University of Technology. He has been a very important team member with unflagging determination to find and access data which are extremely important for the research of Razmafzar team. Together with Venous, Hessam has found and gained access to many important Persian manuscripts.

10) Dr. Denis Toichkin from Ukraine is a leading arms and armor historian and researcher and the author of a book on the history of Cossack cold steel. He is recognized as a specialist in the late medieval and modern history of Eastern European arms and armor. He has published on Persian arms with me in leading Ukranian journals and we are going to publish further articles on Persian arms and armor in future. He plays a pivotal role in arms and armor research in our team.

FAP: Razmafzar is a large, complex art. When a new student wishes to begin training, where do they start? What are the root disciplines of the system?

Khorasani: They will learn sword and shield combinations and spear combinations on foot first. Accompanied by wrestling techniques of course. War wrestling based on Persian manuscripts play an important role in Razmafzar. Persian manuscripts stress that a good warrior is a good wrestler. Then we move to dagger and knife fighting in combination with a shield. Then axe and mace techniques are taught. More complex techniques of sword and shield and wrestling always accompany the curriculum. Then short sword techniques qame and qaddare as civilian weapons follow as the former are battlefield weapons. The whole would take 4-5 years to master. Then they learn archery on foot and then horse archery. The last step will be fighting with weapons and wrestling on horseback. The whole techniques comprise all techniques from ancient Iran into Islamic period. Of course as far as they are evidenced. We do not make up techniques. But Razmafzar deals with all periods of Iran. Participants should also learn about some aspects of historical arms and armor from Iran as well.

FAP: You’ve created the largest single source on Persian Arms and Armour, a companion lexicon, and now a giant overview of Persian martial arts and martial culture. All in your spare time! So what is next for Manouchehr Khorasani and Razmafzar?

Khorasani: Thanks for asking! My next project is finishing my book on historical firearms from Iran. This book contains translated and annotated Persian texts on cannon making, rockets, etc. I have also measured and pictured over 100 unique examples of Persian firearms from Iranian museums. A treasure. I have been classifying and researching all techniques of traditional wrestling arts of Iran. These will be published in different books by me. I am also planning a book on armored combat and horse combat in Persian tradition. And of course together with Mr. Dwyer we are writing a book on Persian archery. Thanks for the interview.

Freelance Academy Press is proud to be distributing Dr. Khorasani’s books here in the United States, and look forward to working with him in the future on other projects.

Here are few video clips of Razmafzar in action:

War Wrestling

Shamshir and Separ (Sword and Buckler)

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Renaissance Swordplay, Victorian-style

n late Victorian England, swordsmanship experienced a unique revival, even as the sword was being rendered useless on the battlefield. The precise origins are murky, but likely began with the Romantic movement of the later 18th century, which created a new interest in medievalism, and captured the popular imagination when Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe in 1819. Throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries there were a series of “Grand Tournaments” – often lavish medieval spectacles and festivals, often featuring jousting competitions.

An Assault at Arms: the Islington Tournament (1880)

How serious most of these efforts were is hard to say, but they, in turn, were one of the influences on the Assaults-at-Arms, displays of skill-at-arms performed as public entertainment. Originally conceived by the military as a way to exhibit fencing, horsemanship and athletics, civilian counterparts soon followed. Many of these events combined competition with showmanship; some were strictly competitive and others little more than farce.

(For a deeper look at the tradition of the Grand Tournaments and the Assaults-at-Arms, see A Grand Assault-at-Arms” Tournaments and Combative Exhibitions in Victorian England at the Electronic Journal of Martial Arts and Sciences.)

Yet, by the 19th century, fencing was becoming an endangered species in England. While romantic adventure novels, and the exploits of real explorer-swordsmen like Sir Richard Francis Burton captured the imagination, it did not fill fencing salles. As a pastime or sport, fencing had never had the same popularity as boxing, and was perceived by many Englishmen as “elitist” and “Frenchified”. With the sword’s prominence as the soldier’s sidearm swiftly being supplanted by the revolver, by the 1880s the future of the art of the sword looked rather grim.

In an effort to recapture the public’s fascination with swordplay, Captain Alfred Hutton and Egerton Castle, both devoted fencers and amateur historians, led a systematic study and reconstruction of combat with all the weapons of the Elizabethan arsenal – the elegant rapier, deadly sword and buckler, and the massive two-handed sword. In a world without the Internet, digital reproduction or inter-library loan, as men of means they had the resources and education to locate – and – read old fencing texts, and the martial training to begin interpreting them. Finding a sympathetic host in the enigmatic Edward Barton-Wright, whose Bartitsu Club would become the center of their efforts, these two men launched the revival of  “ancient swordplay” in England.  Throughout the waning decades of the 19th century, and into the early years of the 20th, their work found practical expression in classes, exhibitions, academic lectures and theatrical combat, for audiences as diverse as school children, soldiers and the Prince of Wales.

Alfred Hutton also had a practical – and political – motivation in drawing public attention to Elizabethan swordplay. Military instruction in swordsmanship had long been based on the French system, which Hutton found artificially academic, and ill-suited to fighting out of the salle against Berbers, Zulu and Indians, all of whom were well-versed in their own methods of sword and spear combat. Never a blushing violet, Hutton lobbied for a new system of swordplay, invigorated by traditional English backsword practice. In 1899 he demonstrated what such a system might look like, when he published Cold Steel, a curriculum for his own system of sabre fencing, combining the Italian sabre school with that of the English backsword. Not only did Cold Steel make use of 18th c English backsword, but Hutton also included lessons on the great stick, the dagger (or un-mounted bayonet) and defense against the same. The latter two subjects were not of his own devising, but rather were taken directly from the instructions of Achille Marozzo’s Opera Nova (1536).

When Hutton’s student, Capt. Cyrill Matthey, published The Complete Works of George Silver in 1899, he noted bitterly that “I suggest sword-fighting is not taught, and it ought to be.” His solution? A return to the practical, combative approach of George Silver, most especially his use of grips. Like his teacher, Matthey was calling for a radical reversion to a method of swordsmanship not seen in 150 years. Like Hutton, his appeals were not heeded.

Although Hutton and Matthey’s efforts to change British military swordsmanship failed, the entire matter was soon made irrelevant – the sword’s days on the battlefield were numbered in years, not decades. But it was their interest in the applicability of historical swordplay to practical, modern swordsmanship that brought Silver’s unpublished Brief Instructions Vpo My Paradoxes of Defence from obscurity into print, which in turn would become one of the first texts to be studied diligently by the second historical swordsmanship revival in the late 20th century.

A Lecture on Fencing - 1891

In 1892, Hutton published a slim volume of fight sequences with the two-handed sword, sword and buckler, rapier, rapier and dagger and smallsword, called Old Swordplay. His audience was clearly the theater, and while the sequences he describes show some relationship to the manuscripts they draw from, they lack the practical martiality of his sabre and stick instructions in Cold Steel. This was because the historical sequences served a very different purpose; to inform actors and directors as to the flavor of historical swordplay; not to turn them into historical swordsmen, per se. Here, Hutton and Castle had great success – until his death, Hutton would continue to stage fights on the London stage, and receive rave reviews for the realism of his fights; being amongst the first fight directors to insist upon correct weapons, armour and technique for the play’s setting. Although this may seem obvious or passe to modern readers, for London theater audiences of the 1890s, this was the first time that the great Tybalt -Romeo duel had rung to the clash of real rapiers and daggers, rather than flimsy foils.

Yet for all of their efforts and public acclaim, Hutton and Castle did not establish a tradition of historical swordsmanship that survived their own generation. Instead, their books and essays were largely forgotten until the second revival of ancient swordplay in the late 20th century. Today’s researchers now often view these early efforts with a cavalier or dismissive eye. In Ancient Swordplay: the Revival of Elizabethan Swordplay in Victorian England,  Tony Wolf, 19th c martial arts scholar, theatrical fight director, and reviver and instructor of the “lost” fighting art of Bartitsu, reexamines Hutton and Castle’s work, both through their own words and those of their enthusiasts, students and critics alike. Tony has unearthed a bevy of rare newspaper illustrations, photographs, play bills and bookplates, many of which can be found in the book’s gallery, and which help fill in the picture of the English revival, and its place in what came both before and after. Every student of historical European martial arts, especially those who believe they know what Castle, Hutton and their circle thought and taught will be in for more than one surprise:

• A tradition of Medieval fests and swordsmanship – some of very dubious derivation – had already become popular throughout Europe and Canada;
• Nearly a generation before Hutton and Castle, Maestro Gregorio Villaamil had already attempted to save La Verdadera Destreza from extinction by reconstructing earlier methods;
• Castle’s views on medieval fencing evolved considerably over the years, and the dismissal of “the rough, untutored swordsmanship” written by a 26 year old prodigy did not reflect those of the mature man;
• If Hutton and Castle had a true “heir” it was not an Englishman, but rather Maitre George Dubois, whose reconstruction of Gladiatorial combat prefigured the field of “Living Archaeology” by over 60 years, and whose syncretic system of modern rapier and dagger fencing would survive into the late 20th century;
• Although the Ancient Swordplay movement failed to survive its founders, they would have considered it to have served its purpose – the preservation of modern fencing.

But what this look into a world of top hats and rapiers best shows is that the modern view of the Victorian revivalists as earnest but misguided amateur scholars is both unfair, and a bit arrogant. Instead, they are revealed as the inventors of a systematic study and practice of lost fighting arts that has only been exceeded in recent years, worthy of being celebrated as the true pioneers in the field.

With Ancient Swordplay, we are very pleased to bring the old boys (and girls! wait until you read about the swordswoman-actress-suffragette-role-reverser Esme Beringer!) back into the limelight, and in the weeks to come we will be uploading a number of images and manuscripts that couldn’t make it into the book. Keep watching this space!

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The Duel of Honor as It Emerged in Medieval Italy

A late-medieval sword duel from a contemporary image.

n the last few months, I have had a chance to deepen my understanding of judicial-dueling jurisprudence, especially as it developed in Italy in the era of Fiore de’ Liberi. I will post a few of my findings here, hoping that they will be of interest to the students of the subject.

Let us start from a reliable period definition of what a duel was as commonly understood in the fourteenth century, and how it differed from other kinds of physical and violent ways in which to settle disputes. According to law-historian Marco Cavina, we are on solid ground when looking for this definition in the writings of fourteenth-century jurist Giovanni da Legnano, who authored an influential treatise on the subject in the period that interests us.[1] Entitled Tractatus de Bello, de Represaliis et de Duello, Giovanni’s treatise defines the duel as “a deliberate physical fight between two, for purification, glory or augmentation of hatred.”[2] The author then specifies that those for glory and augmentation of hatred[3] fall outside the scope of duels as commonly understood at the time, leaving the third specie (gratia purgationis) as the only fitting subject for the rest of his treatise.[4] Giovanni describes this type of duel as one by which a person accused of a misdeed can, lacking preponderant evidence, purge or purify himself of the accusation by proving his case through physical strength (viribus corporeis), and traces the roots of this practice to Lombard law.[5] The duel emerges as a legal proceeding of sorts, between an accuser and a defendant, to unfold through actions of physical strength, and following the dictates of centuries-old jurisprudence.

More specifically, a judicial duel of honor is a type of duel in which the initial offense is to the honor of the offended rather than to his body or property. Historians classify it as distinct from the older duel as an ordeal. Dueling as an ordeal was a sub-specie of the Germanic ordeal (Urteil) with which officials interpreted failure or success in a predetermined physical endeavor as representing God’s judgment in legal disputes that could not be adjudicated through factual evidence.[6] Besides pertaining to cases about personal property, liberty or physical injuries rather than honor, dueling as an ordeal also differed from the duel of honor in another important sense: the litigants in the former fought almost always through professional surrogates called pugiles, while in the latter the accuser and defendant were normally the ones also entering the field of

Giovanni da Legnano, the jurist who authored an influential text on dueling law in the 14th century.

arms.[7] Although scholars disagree about whether Giovanni da Legnano’s definition pertains to the duel of honor,[8] they concur that this form of preordained single combat gradually replaces dueling as an ordeal between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries (as we will see later in more detail).[9]

Perhaps the earliest extant records of dueling to settle legal disputes are in the Lombard Edictum Rothari (AD 643), where it appears as a privilege of the higher class, the liberi. Between that time and the eleventh century, it remains an established juridical procedure in Italian common law for cases lacking material evidence, with the outcome (the judgment of God) having legal force. Dueling for honor comes into being and grows in importance when, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the bellicose values of the feudal knightly class gradually harmonize with the ethos of the nascent urban nobility, which emphasizes honor. In particular, Cavina theorizes that the chivalric code, centering on the cult of the oaths of fealty and of the value of a word given, would become the glue that holds together the aristocratic class. Accordingly, by the mid-1300s the judicial duel for the point of honor is so ingrained in the mores of the Italian nobility that jurist Giovanni da Legnano begins treating is as an institution of natural right (ius naturale).

Meanwhile, theologians and moralists gradually reject the idea of dueling—with the violent death that often comes as a result of this practice—being compatible with biblical and Christian doctrine, although this happens slowly and not without significant exceptions. For instance, there is the fact that an appropriate missa pro duello functions as one of the opening rites before combat, that clerics known to have taken part in duels are at times still allowed to celebrate mass, and that even Thomas Aquinas condones dueling in the Summa Theologica. Even in spite of these exceptions, the attitude of theologians remains one of increasing intolerance for dueling. Finally, dueling becomes the target of increasingly-frequent papal attention in the sixteenth century, until the council of Trent (ending in 1563) makes it categorically illegal under canon law, thereby turning it into an underground activity.

Stay tuned for more information about this fascinating topic, including first-hand accounts of duels in the time in question!

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[1] Cavina, Marco, Il Duello Giudiziario per Punto d’Onore: Genesi, Apogeo e Crisi (Sec. XIV-XVI)(Turin: G. Giappichelli Editore, 2003), 63-70. Cavina states that Giovanni da Legnano completed the treatise in 1360 and that, based on the number of surviving commentaries, it was a highly influential work on the subject.

[2] Giovanni da Legnano, Tractatus de Bello, de Represaliis et de Duello, ed. T. E. Holland (Washington: Oxford University Press, 1917), 175: “Duellum est pugna corporalis deliberata hinc inde duorum, ad purgationem, gloriam, vel odii exaggeratione.”

[3] These are, respectively, dueling in tournaments (or as public spectacles) and acts of private, premeditated aggression between two rivals, the latter including such ideas as the vendetta. See Cavina, Il Duello Giudiziario, 68.

[4] Giovanni da Legnano, Tractatus de Bello, 183-184: “Et [duellum quod fit gratia purgationis] proprie et stricte ‘duellum’ apud vulgares nuncupatur.”

[5] Giovanni da Legnano, Tractatus de Bello, 176. “cum aliquod crimen alicui imponitur, et ad probationem provocans forte carens aliis probationibus … offert se probaturum viribus corporeis, duello suscepto, et provocatus sic se purgat … et de hoc habetur etiam iure cautum … in Lombarda.”

[6] Cavina, Marco, Il Sangue dell’Onore (Rome: Editori Laterza, 2005), 8.

[7] Ibid., 28.

[8] Cavina, Marco, Il Duello Giudiziario, 67.

[9] Cavina, Il Sangue dell’Onore, 17.

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“…as described in the mounted combat”

by Christian H. Tobler

ast year, I penned an article for our website, “In Defense of Peter Von Danzig”, wherein I presented the case for retaining Master Peter’s name as the colloquial moniker for the Codex 44 A 8, a German fighting compendium preserved today in Rome. This manuscript is translated in my FAP title In Saint George’s Name. My reasoning was informed by the facts that a) this manuscript is the only one featuring that master’s work, b) that he was likely still living at the time of its creation, and c) that his is the final treatise in the compendium.

But perhaps there is one more reason to add in defense of this name…

I am often reminded of how repeated readings of a text that I “feeel I know well” can continue to reveal new insights. One such recent reading brought this home, and in a way I feel adds force – albeit with a bit of speculation – to the arguments I presented earlier.

Master Peter’s treatise is devoted exclusively to judicial combat in armour, and only on foot. But in a lesson on deflecting an enemy’s spear with your hand, he says:

Note: this refers to when you have a sword and he has a spear and he thrusts at you with the spear, intending to overreach you, and thrusts a long free thrust to your body. Take heed when he thrusts, and springing wisely and swiftly out from the spear thrust, grasp and throw him with the previously described wrestling, before he thrusts again. But if you have no weapon in your hands, then strike away with your empty hand as described in the mounted combat. […] (emphasis mine)

This is an interesting passage. The master refers to the mounted combat – doubtless a commentary on Liechtenauer’s Roßfechten (Combat on Horse). However, no such commentary treatise appears under Danzig’s name here, nor is any known from any other compendium. Given this, it seems likely that he is referring to the mounted combat commentary appearing earlier in Codex 44 A 8. If so, it might indicate a hand in the compiling of this manuscript – an awareness of its other contents as he was drafting his own final chapter of it.

On its own, such a notion might easily be waved away as overreaching speculation. When added to the other elements I have put forth, it is ‘more grist for the mill’, and perhaps even an indication of an active hand on the part of Peter von Danzig in the creation of Codex 44 A 8 – The Von Danzig Fechtbuch.

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The Despot’s Lament: love poetry, Malatesta-style

A 15th-century illustration of Malatesta IV Malatesta.

he Malatesta of Rimini were an old noble family who rose to wealth and power as condottieri – mercenary soldiers – during the on-going clash of Pope and Emperor, Florence, Milan, Venice and their allies that characterized Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. Ambitious, ruthless, with 100-year old patriarchs, hunchbacks and patrons who commissioned churches built in the form of pagan temples, they often appear the consummate, mustache-twirling villains – and with a name like “Evil Head”, how could they not? Perhaps the family’s most famous scion was Sigismondo, whose long feud with Federigo da Montefeltro is the subject of Hugh Bicheno’s excellent Vendetta: High Art and Low Cunning in the Renaissance.

But one of the most fascinating traits of Italy’s despots was their odd mix of brutality and humanistic love of the arts. As an example, here is a charming little sonnet, written by one of Sigismondo’s ancestors, Malatesta dei Sonneti Malatesta (1370 – 1429) upon the death of his wife, Elizabetta de Varano in 1405.

Born in Pesaro, he was the only son of Pandolfo II Malatesta and his second wife Paola Orsini.  He became lord of Pesaro in 1385. He spent the next seven years fighting as a condottiero for both the pope and Venice, against the growing power of the Visconti of Milan. In 1392 he was excommunicated by the pope for having conquered the papal possession of Todi, while in Venetian employ, but this did not stop him from becoming the Captain General of Bologna in 1394 for the anti-pope, Benedict XIII.

This philosophy of “a new day, a new pope, a new contract” would serve Malatesta well for the next two decades.

After conquering Narni and Orte for himself, he made peace with Pope Boniface. By 1404 he was back in Venetian employ, leading 20,000 troops against Padua. However, the Venetian armywas defeated and returned to Pesaro in late 1404, after which Malatesta made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. It was during this trip that his wife and mother of his seven children, Elizabetta, grew ill.

By 1409, Malatesta had again switched to serve the anti-pope, but ever the pragmatist, by 1412 he had again made peace with the pope, and thenceforth warred against antipope John XXIII. For the next decade he remained in papal service, although often fighting for Florence against Milan.

Yet through all the wars, he also remained a great patron of the arts, sponsoring figures such as Francesco Casini and the painter Mariotto di Nardo, and was in correspondence with humanists Coluccio Salutati and his daughter-in-law, Battista Malatesta. Given the nickname “dei sonetti” (“of the Sonnets”) due to his love for literature, he  was also the author of poems influenced by the style of Petrarch, one such being the lament for his lost Elizabetta:

(translation by Tom Leoni)

XXVI

Dead is the sacred bride, she who maintained

My spirit whole, at peace and satisfied;

In heaven she, and I in grief abide,

Another man than who I was, I waned.

No man, but beast, I should have thought it best

To follow her fine form, now cold with death

Nor e’er depart her side at her last breath,

But burn in fire, there where her heart did rest.

To follow her my soul should have agreed

To heaven’s triumph, where she now resides

Until the end of time, as God decreed.

And even though my strength hardly suffices

For me to join her there, would that at least

My body would be laid by her blest ashes.

(and for those who prefer and can read the original Italian… )

XXVI

Morta è la sancta donna che tenea
mio spirto unito, tacito e contento;
anzi vive nel cielo, e io in tormento
remaso sono, altr’uom ch’io non solea:

non huom, ma bruto, sì che ben dovea
sequire il corpo suo di vita spento,
né mai partir da lato al monimento,
ma incenerarmi ove ’l suo cor giacea,

ché forse l’alma lei sequita arebbe
nel triumpho celeste, ove si vive
eternalmente per divina possa.

Se pur di seguir lei fusser stà privez
le forze mie, almen stato serebbe
sepulto il corpo presso a le sacr’ossa.

Malatesta dei Sonneti Malatesta retired at Gradara, where he died in 1429. The Malatesta family would continue to be a power through the 15th century, but their fortune and land would slowly fall to other ambitious familes: the Sforza and Borgias.

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Really? Did they ask the guys who *use* the armour?

here was a recent study in the UK that measured the cardiovascular effect of wearing armour on combatants:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14204717

 

Ah, science!

Now, as much fun as the image of a man in 15th century harness on a treadmill might be, the summary of the test’s conclusions was rather fascinating:

Medieval suits of armour were so exhausting to wear that they could have affected the outcomes of famous battles, a study suggests.

Full disclosure: when we first heard about this study, it was from a link to a short article on the History Channel’s webpage. Knowing the HC’s policy of only basing its article and programs on carefully considered historiography, archaeological sources, scientifically rigorous data gathering and a strict avoidance of sensationalism (you know, like Ancient Aliens, Ice Truckers or that show about the guys running a pawn shop)…oh, yes, that was why we never followed up on it!

But it turns out that this was a serious study done at the University of Leeds, by real scientists.  So how is it that their study found that armoured combatants of the late Middle Ages were hampered to the point of exhaustion by their armour? Especially when so many demonstrations of men in harness – including at the Royal Armouries, who provided the test subjects and armour, make note of how relatively easily an armoured man can run, climb, roll, mount a horse, and so forth?

Well, the first problem might be with what the researchers considered field armour:

Lead researcher Dr Graham Askew, from the University of Leeds, said: “You look at these suits of armour, and they weigh between 30 and 50kg, so it is a huge fraction of the wearer’s body weight.”

Really? While 30kg, or approximately 66 lbs is a fair approximation of a late 14th century harness, 15th century field armours – as opposed to jousting armour – generally got lighter. And 110lbs of harness? Where does this figure come from?

The data sample for the study is freely available on the Royal Society’s website: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/07/15/rspb.2011.0816/suppl/DC1 Unfortunately, it is quite problematic. Firstly, there are only nine sample harnesses. Of these, one is the Churburg 19 harness, an armour made for a man who would be a giant by modern standards, at nearly 7′ tall.  This is the 53 kg harness; all of the others are between 25 and 34 kg. Of course, two of those are the modern reproductions, one of which was a pretty good average at 30 kg, the other which was on a par with the heaviest armour (except for Churburg 19) at 38 kg. Fair enough, but this means the data sample is really five armours (all composites). That isn’t a very large data set, especially only one of the armours is contemporary with Agincourt, the battle to which the researchers applied their conclusions.

Regardless, the data set, small as it is, points to something that arms and armour scholars have noted for years: the average harness weight is approximately 60 – 70 lbs; about equivalent to the load of a modern soldier in full gear, or the heavy infantry of Rome and Greece, likely because that is what a man can carry and still fight effectively. So it is even more interesting the the study concluded that soldiers in modern field gear felt far less encumbered with their weapons, armour and field packs. Considering the number of modern soldiers who seem to enjoy reenactment combat, one would assume that this conclusion was based on both subjective and objective findings, right? You know, what do the guys who actually experience strenuous activity in the gear think? Surely this was noted as well?

Not so much. Apparently, a treadmill was as high-tech as this got:

To study this, researchers asked four participants, who regularly re-enact battles for the Royal Armouries in Leeds, to don their exact-replica armour from England, Gothic Germany and Italy and get onto a treadmill.

By recording how much oxygen they took in and carbon dioxide they produced, the team was able to calculate how much energy they were using. High-speed cameras also helped the researchers to study how the volunteers were using their limbs.

Of course, walking and running a treadmill does not use the same sort of motions or mechanics as fighting, it does not produce endorphins and adrenaline in the same way that combat does.

So, does this test really simulate anything besides…well…using a treadmill in armour? We can’t really say, but certainly it doesn’t match the subjective experience of people who wear and fight in harness, while it certainly seems to be a throwback to the notion of armour as impossibly ponderous and awkward. It is probably best to keep the comments of Thom Richardson, keeper of armours, from the Royal Armouries in mind as a caveat:

 “It is interesting to use scientific method to answer these questions, and it confirms what we have always suspected – heavy armour would very much reduce your ability to run around.

“But no-one wears stuff on the battlefield if it isn’t useful.”

And certainly, the University of Leeds has proven one thing: don’t wear your armour on a treadmill!

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What’s in a Name? Relics of a forgotten martial past…

he sword’s impact on our language and our customs remains, long after it has become irrelevant in our daily lives.

Men still shake hands with their right, or sword hands, to show that they are empty. When escorted by a man at formal events, a woman holds his left arm, so as not to encumber his sword arm. Military officers still receive a sword as part of their commission.

So much for formal customary. But what about daily language? Look at the following terms:

Cloak and Dagger. Cavalier. Swashbuckler.

As modern people, well all know what these terms mean:

Cloak and Dagger: pertaining to, characteristic of, or dealing in espionage or intrigue, especially of a romantic or dramatic kind.

Cavalier: n. – a gentleman; adj. – haughty, disdainful, or supercilious. Behaving in an off-hand manner.

Swashbuckler: 1) a swaggering soldier, or adventurer; daredevil. 2) An adventure story, novel or movie.

But where do they come from? Maybe that’s answered best by looking at how someone might have defined these terms a few centuries ago:

Cloak and Dagger: the twin companions of any well-dressed man when out and about in the streets, and often the only tools he had available to defend himself from ambushers. [The fencing master, Achille Marozzo, even includes a chapter on fighting with the cloak and dagger in his 1536 treatise, Opera Nova.]

Cavalier: a knight or mounted horseman.

Swashbuckler: a swaggering soldier or roustabout, so named for the sound of his sword and buckler scraping against each other on his belt as he walks.

The words themselves have survived into the modern era, but divorced from the martial culture that produced them, their original meaning has become obscured. This is even truer of expressions. The metaphor “the thrust of the argument” is readily clear. But an argument isn’t a physical thing (usually!), so you can’t really thrust with it. Therefore, the idea of driving forcefully through someone’s verbal defense is meaningful only because we can envision the connection to swordplay.

On the other hand, the threat “to beat the daylights out of you” makes absolutely no literal sense, no matter how we parse it. That is, until we realize that it has a 15^th c origin as “letting the daylight into you”; which was a colloquial way of threatening to run someone through with a sword or knife.

Of course, these are just a few examples of how the martial culture of the Western world influenced one of its younger languages – English – and that influence is felt long after those martial arts had become extinct

This was the idea behind the name of our press. After all, anyone in the publishing field knows that a freelance is:

a person who works as a writer, designer, performer, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, day, job, etc., rather than working on a regular salary basis for one employer.

But how many know that this grew out of the older definition:

a knight or professional man-at-arms, with full armour and horse, who contends in a cause or in a succession of various causes, without personal attachment or allegiance.

Of course, the modern definition served our purposes admirably – authors work with their publishers in precisely a freelance capacity, and all four of the press’ founders are or have been freelancers themselves. But there was also the appeal of a reference to a forgotten part of our culture hidden in plain sight – precisely what the reconstruction of lost martial arts is all about, and precisely what we are trying to reveal by publishing ancient treatises and new scholarship.

So Freelance, it is, with all that implies!

(Besides, Clotpol Academy Press was already taken.)

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