By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The higher-spirited contestants eventually became frustrated with just occasional jousts and introduced the pas d’armes, in which a knight would announce his intention to hold a designated terrain, usually a natural passage of some sort, for a certain duration against all comers. By the fifteenth century individual challenges were issued to particular knights; from the pas d’armes to the duel was but a short step.

  DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY MOST OF France and much of Italy faced a new threat: rulers might requisition a fighting army, but they had no means of redeploying that army in times of peace. Thousands of soldiers were thrown out of work at the end of every war, becoming bent on rampaging and pillaging as an alternative way of life. A succession of popes first issued indulgences to those who opposed these routiers, as they were called; then, fearing that the well-being of the whole Christian community was at stake, organized crusades against them.‖ Finally they settled on a better strategy, prevailing on these veterans to fight in the service of a holy war—to journey to the eastern Mediterranean, to Hungary, and to Spain to fight the advancing Muslims. This strategy began as far back as the First Crusade (1095–99) and in varying degrees continued until the Eighth Crusade of 1270 to 1272 and the loss of the last Christian fortress in Syria in 1291, putting to effective use men whose whole purpose was to fight for profit. These mercenaries formed themselves into disciplined, well-organized companies with their own treasurers, secretaries, and counselors. The routiers were well practiced in the arts of swordplay, and from their ranks came many of the first instructors of fencing.

  By the time of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) the missile weapon of choice was the longbow, and it was the mastery of this technology (along with suicidally brave French tactics) that gave the English victories at the decisive battles of Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415). It was six feet long and three inches in circumference, made of yew, and required a force of one hundred pounds to draw it. (When the body of an archer was recovered from the dredged-up Mary Rose, lost in 1545, the bone of the left arm was much thicker than that of the right, and his shoulder and spinal bones were noticeably deformed.) It would be joined by its cousin, the crossbow, an Italian invention capable of piercing mail from three hundred yards away. (The Chinese would come up with an automatic crossbow that could shoot several arrows at a time.) Together the crossbow and longbow spelled the end of the supremacy of the mounted soldier.

  At Agincourt, an English army five thousand strong met a French force three times its number, yet suffered casualties of just one hundred foot soldiers and thirteen men-at-arms. Some five thousand Frenchmen died: two thousand killed in action, the rest slaughtered as prisoners rather than ransomed—despite having surrendered on terms—when a last French attack seemed dangerously close to success. (Ransoming prisoners was a prime means for soldiers to make money, but Henry V wanted his men to concentrate on winning the battle.) It was one of the last major engagements in which swords, rather than missile weapons or firearms, played a major role, the main support to the longbow.

  However, it was on the confused battlefields of Crécy that a new power of war made its first significant appearance: gunpowder. A mixture of sulfur, carbon, and sodium or potassium nitrate, the world’s oldest known explosive was invented in China, but the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (1214–92) was its best-known proponent.a In 1911 a historian wrote typically of “Friar Bacon’s villainous saltpetre,” which, while it “choked Don Quixote’s dream, produced the art of fence.”18 With gunpowder, “the one excuse for a complete protection of the body vanished.” Even so, the revolution was a slow-turning one. Until the early seventeenth century, the longbow remained superior to any weapon using gunpowder, as it was both more accurate and more efficient. Cannon were used effectively in battering and siege work but when tried in the field met with little success; they were regarded at first as more a bad joke than a threat, at best noise makers and horse frighteners. The availability of handguns did little to alter military thinking, as their use was rare.

  Armor increased in thickness, and it became common to “proof” a breastplate by firing a shot against it at point-blank range. The resulting dent was not hammered out, but retained and often embellished, as proof of the armor’s quality.

  It was not until the 1450s or later that guns came to be a force on the battlefield, and another fifty years would pass before they came into general use. Geoffrey Chaucer’s reference in The House of Fame to the lightning speed of a shot—“As swifte as pellet out of gonne / When fyre is through the poudre ronne”—could refer to either guns or cannon. However, once guns came into play the effect was radical. “Would to God,” wrote Blaise de Montluc in 1523, “that this unhappy weapon had never been invented.”

  On February 25, 1525, François I of France met the Emperor Charles V in the “half-light of a winter dawn” outside the gardens of a nobleman’s park near Pavia. His troops were decisively beaten. “One of the turning points in political history,” writes Oakeshott, “it was also a watershed in the history of armour.… The slaughter of France’s nobility in this battle was only equalled by that of Agincourt.”19 Cavalry might retain its place in military affection till 1914, but not even overlapping armor plates could offer protection against bullets. The game was up.

  Bit by bit, warriors discarded their armor and so became more vulnerable to skilled swordsmen.b Skills honed on the battlefield were already producing a body of men willing and able to teach the art of swordplay, and the codes of chivalry had defined how swordsmen should conduct themselves. The formal duel of honor had become a part of European culture, and swords were no longer the costly appurtenances they once had been. As they multiplied, there was a further need to learn the skills of self-defense.

  Around the same time another invention increased the popularity of swordplay even further—what Marshall McLuhan has called “the making of typographical man.” A cluster of innovations, including movable metal type, oil-based ink, and the wooden handpress, revolutionized learning. For the first time those who taught fencing could have their ideas printed and disseminated. The age of the master had arrived.

  * In the laws of the Ripuarian Franks, a scale fixed the price of different articles of a warrior’s equipment in Charlemagne’s time:

  A sword with sheath………………….7 sous

  A sword without sheath………………….3 sous

  A horse (entire), not blind, and sound………………….6 sous

  Thus a sword with sheath cost more than a good horse—a reflection, possibly, of the scarcity of swordsmiths.12

  † It was never called “a suit of armor,” a phrase that arose only about 1600, but always “harness.” The expression “he died in harness” does not mean that a man was, at death, doing his job like a horse, but that he was wearing full armor. “Armed” originally meant wearing armor—not carrying a weapon.

  ‡ From 1100 to 1605 tournaments were particularly popular in France; they started to decline only in 1559, with the death of the tournament-loving Henri II, who gave a succession of them in Paris to celebrate the marriage of his daughter to Philip II, King of Spain. During the first two days Henri jousted a number of times with lords from his court and, emboldened by his success, decided to try his luck against the celebrated champion the Count de Montgomeri, who had previously wounded Francis I. Catherine de Médicis implored her husband not to fight, but he said he would break one more lance, in her honor. The king fought with his visor raised; whether from the outset or knocked open by a blow from Montgomeri’s lance is unknown. Montgomeri’s point broke off in their first interchange and the broken end of the lance then struck the king so violent a blow above the right eye, ripping across his face, that he was thrown from his horse and, deprived instantly of speech and understanding, lingered on for eleven days before he died at the age of forty.

  § From 1190 to 1350 knights wore a harness of metal; then, following the French defeat at Crécy, the s
tronger plate metal. There was never any such thing as “chain mail.” According to the OED, “mail” meant “little spots,” as derived from the Latin macula (as in the Immaculate Conception), in French mailles; but another word, malleus, meaning “hammer,” is a more likely derivation. It was flexible and strong, so that we read of Richard I’s crusaders in 1191 fighting unharmed with Saracen arrows sticking out of their mail like feathers. It disappeared around 1650.

  Up to about 1475, the fashion in armor throughout northern Europe was for slender, exaggeratedly pointed forms, with slim-fitting doublet, long-toed shoes, and a mantle, either long or short. The interplay between fashion and technology works both ways, and while this style served men for some nine hundred years, around 1495 there was a sudden and dramatic change. Within half a decade, all over Europe, the old style vanished. The silhouette of the typical knight became rotund and burly after the Italian fashion (Henry VIII’s last suit of armor has a waist of fifty-eight inches—but that was not a fashion statement). Yet for another fifty years there came no corresponding change in swords.

  ‖ Papal fear was palpable. An edict of 1364 ordered the mercenaries to disband their companies, leave the areas they had taken over, and repair the damage they had done—all within a month—or suffer excommunication. Clerics and laymen were forbidden to join, employ, or favor the companies; anyone supplying them with food would be anathematized to the extent that only papal absolution could release them. A further edict the following year aggravated these sentences: all towns, villages, and individuals found guilty of negotiating with routiers would have their privileges, liberties, and fiefs withdrawn; routiers and their descendants would be ineligible for public office for three generations; and their vassals would be released from their oaths of loyalty. In 1368 it was decreed that any church or cemetery where a routier had been buried would be placed under interdict until the corpse was exhumed and removed. As one historian sharply comments, “All that was left was the crusade.”17

  a From the ninth century on, Chinese technicians developed whole new families of weapons based on gunpowder—flame-throwing “fire-lances,” grenades, catapult-launched bombs, shrieking rockets, and the first true cannon. But China’s ruling bureaucrats, serene in their confidence that power would always be rooted in the ancient literary classics, remained aloof, the mechanics of war beneath their interests. No one was tempted to rethink military affairs.

  b Members of present-day societies for the reenactment of medieval swordplay are passionate about its high quality. The Australian historian Stephen Hand has attested that in 2001 he started researching actual medieval techniques for the use of the large shield. “The system I discovered is based around using the shield to close lines of attack, deflecting rather than blocking attacks. After about six weeks of drills with this system I was untouchable. I have been to a few reenactments since and have yet to be touched by anyone putting their twentieth-century intelligence to the problem of how to use sword and shield. The historical system is so far advanced over what modern individuals do that I was, frankly, shocked. Why should I have been shocked, though? We’re modern amateurs, practicing a couple of times a week with no actual negative consequences for losing. They were trained professionals who died if they got it wrong.”20

  Now Archery is … being neglected in favor of swordplay: for of fence in every town there are not only masters to teach it, with his provosts, ushers, scholars and other names of art and school, but there has not failed also which have diligently and well-favorably written it, and is set out in print that every man shall read it.

  —ROGER ASCHAM, Toxophilus, 1545

  How people choose to defend themselves is as much part of national character as literature, costumes or cooking.

  —RICHARD F. BURTON, The Sentiment of the Sword, 1911

  THERE IS A CLASSIC PILGRIMAGE FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN THE history of swordplay: traveling the fifteen miles from Brussels to the small Catholic university town of Louvain. I have made the journey twice, past the Place Herbert Hoover, on to the Place Ladeuze, and up through the fresh-smelling, orderly corridors of the main library to the three rooms where I was allowed to delve into the greatest specialist collection of books on fencing in the world.

  The collection was begun in 1902, when an eighteen-year-old British schoolboy bought his first book about swords. Forty-three years later, Archibald Harrison Corble had assembled his extraordinary library. “Archie” Corble had been a good sabreur in his time, winning the British championship in 1922 and competing two years later in the Paris Olympics. During his various sallies abroad he had made several good friends in Belgium and was horrified to learn, just before he went to fight in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915, that the invading German army had set fire to Louvain University, razing its renowned library. After the war Corble made a name for himself as a bibliophile and donated several books to Louvain. In 1940 the library was again set ablaze, this time by Nazi warplanes. Corble decided that when he died his collection would go to the university—and so in 1945 it did, almost two thousand books and manuscripts charting the evolution of swordplay over three and a half centuries.

  This unique collection allowed me to track the arrival of the fencing master and the introduction of a new weapon, the rapier, into the alleyways and taverns of Europe, which led to a revolution in technique. Corble’s legacy is in more than one sense a catholic assemblage, stretching through classic Italian works from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries on to Josef Muls’s 1929 study Melancholia, an examination of that affliction in twenty of Belgium’s leading artists, a number of them fencers. If it touched on swordplay, Corble was interested in it.

  UP UNTIL THE START OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY THERE MAY HAVE been two dozen or so manuals on fencing, but these were not widely read, and masters, mainly army veterans, passed on a hodgepodge of techniques, mixing together swordplay, dagger work, and wrestling moves—anything that would help their pupils survive. Egerton Castle’s view was that “each individual master taught merely a collection of tricks that he had found, in the course of an eventful life, to be generally successful in personal encounters, and had practised until the ease and quickness acquired in their execution made them very dangerous to an unscientific opponent.”1 All that was about to change.

  The oldest extant work on fencing is a late-thirteenth-century German manuscript, “I 33,” now in the Royal Armouries at Leeds, which in thirty-two leaves shows a monklike figure (sacerdos) giving instruction to a pupil with sword and buckler, with short commentaries written in Latin. There are also wrestling moves—monks at that time were famous for their excellence as wrestlers. The next entry in Corble’s library is dated 1389 and ascribed to Johannes Liechtenauer, a famous master at Nuremberg. Liechtenauer’s treatise is full of hints about feints, secret thrusts, and surprise parries. Another German, Hans Talhoffer, compiled his Fechtbuch in 1443, recording the rules for legal duels and other single combats. Talhoffer himself served as the model for the book’s sixty-five illustrations, which mix swordplay with wrestling, tripping, daggers, and cudgels; it is as much a manual for survival as a book about fencing.* Johannes Gutenberg’s invention, in 1450, of movable type ignited an explosion of books on the “science of fence”—from Perpignan (not then part of France) to Spain, Italy, and Germany. In Elizabethan England the average edition of such a book was an amazing 1,250 copies—the equivalent of a major best-seller today. By 1500 printers’ workshops could be found in every important municipal center in Europe. A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine named the city for himself in A.D. 330. As Elizabeth Eisenstein has pointed out, it was teachers in particular who “benefited from the way their personal charisma could be augmented and amplified by the printed word.”2 Between 1516 and 1884 more than five hundred works about fencing were published. The Conti
nent was agog.3

  The new science was powerful enough to draw major artists to its aid: in 1512 Albrecht Dürer prepared a series of 123 etchings illustrating wrestling holds and throws and a further 58 engravings of fighting with swords, staves, and daggers. But it was the Italians who were the leading theorists, and the master most widely read abroad was Achille Marozzo. Styling himself “the Gladiator of Bologna,” he published his Opera Nova in 1536. Marozzo was the first to establish a regular system. Parrying with the blade is ignored; he describes instead how to deflect an attack either with a dagger in the nonsword hand, with different forms of shields, or with a cloth wound around the defending arm. He advised masters to insist their students swear an oath never to fight their teacher and not to pass on what they had been taught without express permission. Opera Nova sold out five editions over the next hundred years, and some of its illustrations were still being plagiarized well into the eighteenth century.

  Marozzo was writing for teachers of swordplay, but the demand for books on fencing was far broader than that. According to The Book of the Courtier, published in Venice in 1528, any man of consequence should know about all forms of weapons. The author, the great dandy and man of letters Baldassare Castiglione, observed that the ideal courtier had to possess “strength, lightnesse, and quicknesse,” as well as being able to handle every kind of sword, “for beside the use that he shall have of them in war … there happen oftentimes variances between one gentleman and another, whereupon ensueth a combat.” Castiglione’s Courtier, along with Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting (1435), which rewrote the rules of painting, were the most influential and widely read of all Renaissance treatises. Fencing skills would now serve an ambitious gentry as a necessary quality for social preferment, not only as a means of self-defense.