The blades were tied and the sharp rapiers flashed around their bare heads. After barely three minutes the opponent applied a cut diagonally across the bridge of Nietzsche’s nose right where too hard a pinch leaves a red mark. The blood was dripping to the ground, and the experts determined it to be sufficient atonement for all past injury. I loaded my well-bandaged friend into a carriage and took him home to bed, cooled the wound diligently, denied him visitors and alcohol, and in two or three days our hero had recuperated except for a tiny diagonal scar across his bridge of the nose, which he kept all his life and which did not look bad on him.8
The experience must have given Nietzsche comfort, because he later wrote (in Human, All Too Human) that dueling was “a great blessing.” In all its modern forms, our masks securely in place, it surely is.
Richard Cohen, New York, January, 2012
PROLOGUE
1. Egerton Castle, Schools and Masters of Fence from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, with a Sketch of the Development of the Art of Fencing with the Rapier and the Small Sword (London: Arms and Armour, 1969). Despite Castle’s immense influence, his shortcomings have been recently pointed out, partly by William Gaugler in History of Fencing (Bangor, Maine: Laureate Press, 1998), and with formidable insight by Sydney Anglo in The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
2. Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), p. 19.
3. Rabbi J. L. Zlotnik, Swearing by a Sword (Johannesburg, 1948), p. xxxviii.
4. Bill Bryson, The Times, September 26, 2000.
5. Sir John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 10.
CHAPTER 1: HOW IT ALL BEGAN
1. R. Ewart Oakeshott, The Archaeology of Weapons (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1994), p. 25.
2. See Julius Palffy-Alpar, Sword and Masque (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1967), p. 2, for both this assertion and the quotation, not sourced, from the Mahabharata.
3. Quoted in J. K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 85.
4. Plato, Laws, VIII, 834 (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
5. Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (1992), p. 96. See also Ralph Jackson, ed., Gladiators and Caesars (London: British Museum Press, 1992), pp. 46–7.
6. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Twenty-second Epistle, “Ad Lucilium” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
7. Vegetius, quoted in George Watson, The Roman Soldier (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 57. See also Renatus Flavus Vegetius, De re militari, vol. 1, pp. 11, 12, 14, 17, and Niccolò Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, vol. 2 (Rome: Salerno, 2001), p. 372.
8. Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola, 36.
9. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, vol. 14, pp. 9–10. See also The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, tr. Edward Spelman, Loeb Library, 1937–40, pp. 269–77.
10. Oakeshott, The Archaeology of Weapons, p. 51.
11. Ibid., p. 83.
12. Garabed Artin Davoud-Oghlou, Histoire de la législation des anciens Germains (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1845).
13. R. Ewart Oakeshott, A Knight in His Armour (London: Lutterworth, 1961), p. 13.
14. Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
15. Chrétien de Troyes, quoted in Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments, Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk [England]: Boydell Press, 1989), p. 126.
16. Oakeshott, op. cit., p. 190.
17. Norman Housley, Crusading and Warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Aldershot [England], 2001), p. 258.
18. Theodore Cook, Preface to Richard Burton, The Sentiment of the Sword (London: Horace Cox, 1911).
19. R. Ewart Oakeshott, European Weapons and Armour: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution (Guildford: Lutterworth, 1980), p. 30.
20. Stephen Hand, in an e-mailed letter to the author dated 4 December 2002.
CHAPTER 2: ENTER THE MASTER
1. Castle, Schools and Masters of Fence, chap. 2.
2. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Modern Europe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 92.
3. Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 322, fn. 63.
4. In England in 1597, the warrior class numbered about 30,000, of whom 60 would have been lords, 500 knights, and some 5,800 squires and gentlemen. Together with their families, they constituted about 0.6 percent of the population. In no European country did the warrior class much exceed 1 percent.
5. R. Ewart Oakeshott, The Sword in the Age of Chivalry (Guildford: Lutterworth, 1964), p. 25. On Luther, see Karl von Raumer, Geschichte der Pädagogik (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1843–54), vol. 1, pp. 142–3.
6. Anthony Holden, Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player (New York: Bantam, 1995), p. 302.
7. F. C. Grove, Introduction to W. H. Pollock, Fencing (London: Longman, 1897), p. 6.
8. Ramon Martinez, “Spanish Fencing in the Sixteenth Century,” The Sword, April 1998, pp. 25 ff.
9. Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (London: A. Murray, 1868).
10. Holinshed, quoted in Aylward, The English Master at Arms, p. 17.
11. Ascham, Toxophilus.
12. George Silver, Paradoxes of Defence, Wherein Is Proved the True Ground of Fight to Be in the Short Ancient Weapons, Etc. (London: E. Blount, 1599), reissued in The Works of George Silver, ed. Cyril G. R. Mathey (London: G. Bell, 1898).
13. Craig Turner and Tony Soper, Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. xiv ff.
14. Grove, op. cit., Introduction, p. 4.
15. Castle, Schools and Masters of Fence, p. 16. See also Turner and Soper, Methods and Practice, p. 7, and G. W. Thornbury, Shakespeare’s England (London: Longman, 1856), p. 182.
16. Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, p. 11.
17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Tarquin of Cheapside,” Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Scribner’s, 1922).
CHAPTER 3: A WILD KIND OF JUSTICE
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh ed., 1910, vol. 11, p. 638, “Duel.”
2. Major Ben Chambers Truman, The Field of Honor, Being a Complete and Comprehensive History of Dueling in All Countries; Including the Judicial Duel of Europe, the Private Duel of the Civilized World, and Specific Descriptions of All the Noted Hostile Meetings in Europe and America (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1884).
3. Cornelius Tacitus, Germania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), ch. 5.
4. See Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), p. 649 ff.
5. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), p. 29.
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth ed., p. 87.
7. See Biographia Britannica, vol. 4, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons (London: Rivington, 1789), pp. 445–7. The entry admits that Crichton’s reputation rests largely on the writings of Urquhart, “a fanciful seventeenth-century writer,” who in 1652, during a period of captivity, penned Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel, which includes his cameo on Crichton.
8. See John Fleck, “A Jewel of a Duel,” The Sword, July 1992, pp. 14 and 19.
9. Chamberlain, in Handbook of American Indians, vol. 2, p. 77, quoted in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, “Duel,” p. 117.
10. See Turner and Soper, Methods and Practices of Elizabethan Swordplay, p. 61.
11. Samuel Pepys, Diary and Correspondence, vol. 2 (London: H. Colburn, 1849), p. 165.
12. Andrew Steinmetz, The Romance of Duelling (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), pp. 36–7.
13. William Douglas, Duelling Days in the Army (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), p. 204.
1
4. Captain John Godfrey, Treatise Upon the Science of Defence (London, 1747), pp. 40–1.
15. The Spectator, no. 99.
16. See John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 24–5.
17. See Lewis Gibbs, Sheridan: His Life and His Theatre (New York: Morrow, 1948), pp. 35–8. See also Linda Carlyle McCollum, “No, By God I Won’t!” The Richard Sheridan/Thomas Mathews Duels, printed on the Internet by the Society of American Fight Directors.
18. Steinmetz, The Romance of Duelling, p. 43.
19. Ibid., p. 678.
20. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
21. See letter of October 16, 1777.
22. John Milton, Defensio Secunda, vol. 8, pp. 60–62, quoted in William Riley Barker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 252.
23. William Hickling Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1843).
24. Mary Purcell, The First Jesuit (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1957), pp. 22–3; see also Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Ignatius Loyola: An Attempt at an Impartial Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1923).
25. These and other quotations are taken from George Walter Thornbury, Haunted London (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1865), p. 52 ff.
26. See Sir Ian Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 266.
27. See Roy Goodall, “Duelling Stories: No. 16. A Lordly Affair,” The Sword/Fencing (joint issue), Autumn 1977, pp. 24–5.
28. William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond (New York: Garland, 1989), p. 325.
CHAPTER 4: FRANCE IN THE AGE OF THE MUSKETEERS
1. Nancy Mitford, Voltaire in Love (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), pp. 35–6. See also James Parton, Life of Voltaire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), p. 189.
2. David Bodanis, E = mc2 (New York: Walker, 2000), pp. 58–67.
3. François Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Modern France, ed. and tr. by Trista Selous (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 65–6.
4. See Anthony Levi, Cardinal Richelieu (London: Constable, 2000), pp. 104–6.
5. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, vol. 2, essay 17, (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 730. In The Consolations of Philosophy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000). Alain de Bolton says simply, “He had never been good at sports” (p. 153).
6. See René Descartes, Correspondences, ed. C. Adam and G. Milhaud, vol. 1 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1936), pp. 129–31; for details about The Art of Fencing, see Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, p. 140.
7. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois (Paris: Garnier, 1868).
8. Quoted by Oakeshott, The Archaeology of Weapons, p. 236.
9. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 2. In May this year, a major new work on fencing in France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century appeared—Le Sentiment du Fer, by Pascal Brioist, Herve Drévillon, and Pierre Serna (Orleans: Champ Vallon, 2002).
10. Richard Francis Burton, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California, Box 1, 107.
11. F. C. Grove, op. cit., Introduction, p. 18.
12. See J. D. Aylward, “Bygones,” The Sword, Winter 1957, pp. 93 ff.
13. Geoffrey F. Hall, and Joan Sanders, D’Artagnan, The Ultimate Musketeer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1964); see also Jean Lucas-Dubreton, The Fourth Musketeer (New York: Coward-McCann, 1928).
14. Cameron Rogers, Gallant Ladies (New York: Harcourt, 1928), pp. 177–206. The other quotations about La Maupin are from the same chapter.
15. G. Letaintorier-Fradin, La Maupin, sa vie, ses duels, ses aventures (Paris: Flammarion, 1904). In the accounts of two other historians of the period, Andrew Steinmetz and Arsène Vigéant, La Maupin is said to have killed all three men outright.
16. Grove, op. cit., Introduction, p. 20.
17. Rafael Sabatini, Master-at-Arms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), p. 11.
18. M. S. Coryn, The Chevalier d’Eon, 1728–1810 (London: Butterworth, 1932), p. 23.
19. See Robert Baldick, Introduction to Frédéric Gaillardet, Mémoires du Chevalier d’Eon (London: Blond, 1970), pp. xv–xvi.
20. Octave Homberg, D’Eon de Beaumont, His Life and Times (London: Secker, 1911), pp. 20–1.
21. Horace Bleakley, Casanova in England, Being the Account of the Visit to London in 1763–4 of Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (London: John Lane, 1923), p. 141.
22. Homberg, D’Eon de Beaumont, pp. 272–3.
23. Gaillardet, Mémoires du Chevalier d’Eon, p. 311.
24. Coryn, The Chevalier d’Eon, p. 218.
25. Carl Thimm, A Complete Bibliography of Fencing & Duelling, as practised by all European nations from the Middle Ages to the present day (London and New York: John Lane, 1896), p. 249.
26. Steinmetz, The Romance of Duelling, p. 280.
27. Arsène Vigéant, Un Maître d’armes sous la Restauration (Paris: Motleroz, 1883).
28. Taken from an original screenplay/novel outline by Daniel Marciano. See also Gabriel Letainturier-Fradin, Les Joeurs d’épée en France (Paris: Flammarion, 1907), p. 328.
29. Henry Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, with Memoirs of His Late Father and Friends (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830).
30. Steinmetz, The Romance of Duelling, p. 281.
31. See Alain Guédé, Monsieur de Saint-Georges, le Nègre des lumières (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999).
32. Simon Schama, Citizens (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 5.
33. See Richard Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 280, and Death in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 5.
34. J. M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte, His Rise and Fall (London: Basil Blackwell, 1963). See also Vincent Cronin, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: Morrow, 1972), p. 42.
35. Truman, The Field of Honor, p. 460.
36. See Arsène Vigéant, Jean-Louis (Paris: Motteroz, 1883), tr. Michel Sebastiani, Princeton, N.J., 1999, private ms.
CHAPTER 5: THE GREAT SWORDMAKERS
1. Raoul Sudre, The Fencing News, vol. 1, no. 10, June 1980.
2. See G. B. Depping, Wayland Smith: A Dissertation on a Tradition of the Middle Ages from the French of G. D. Deeping and Francisque Michel (London: W. Pickering, 1847).
3. Alexandre Dumas, My Memoirs, 1826–36, vol. 5 (London: Methuen, 1907–9).
4. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Passing of Arthur” (London: Macmillan, 1884).
5. André de Liancour, Le Maistre d’armes, ou, l’exercise de l’épée seule, 1686, cited in J. D. Aylward, The Sword, Winter 1957.
6. Anthony Harding, Swords and Hilt Weapons (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 12.
7. Burton papers, Huntington Library, Box 14, 10; Sheffield Daily Telegraph, April 10, 1895, quoting article in The Magazine of Art.
8. “Medieval Metal Masters,” Discovery, January 2000; see also James Trefil, “Supersteel of the Ancients,” Science Digest, February 1983.
9. Anjana Ahuja, “Blade of Damascus,” The Times, December 14, 2000.
10. The Sword Book in Honcho Gunkiko and the Book of Same, tr. Henri L. Joly and Inada Hogitaro (New York: C. E. Tuttle, 1963), p. 92, fn.
11. James E. Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials: or, Why You Don’t Fall Through the Floor (London: Penguin, 1968).
12. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
13. Theophilus Presbyter, Scheme of Various Arts, 1847. Quoted in Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials, p. 239.
14. Steinmetz, The Romance of Duelling.
15. Félix del Valle y Díaz, La Espada en Toledo (Toledo: Gráficas Minaya, 1997).
16. Albert Weyersberg, The Solingen Sword Manufacture down through the Ages (Solingen, 2001).
17. Frederick J. Stephens, Daggers, Swords and
Bayonets of the Third Reich (Wellingborough [England]: Patrick Stephens, 1989), p. 13.
18. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), pp. 686–7.
19. Major James P. Atwood, The Daggers and Edged Weapons of Hitler’s Germany (Savannah, Ga.: Militaria Publications, 1965).
20. Jacob Bronowski reminds us in The Ascent of Man (op. cit.), that the “making of a sword, like all ancient metallurgy, is surrounded with ritual, and that is for a clear reason. When you have no written language, when you have nothing that can be called a written formula, then you must have a precise ceremonial that fixes the sequence of operations so that they can be exact and memorable.”
21. Sir John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 45
22. Bruce Chatwin, “The Estate of Maximilian Tod” (London: Cape, 1990).
23. Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1960), p. 42; in his study Armed Martial Arts of Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), G. C. Hurst gives the figure as “often resulting in more than 30,000 layers of steel” (p. 33).
24. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man.
25. Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (New York: Putnam, 1907).
CHAPTER 6: THE PERFECT THRUST
1. Burton, The Sentiment of the Sword, pp. 100, 122.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh ed., 1911, “Fencing.”
3. Arsène Vigéant, Almanac of Fencing (Paris: Motteroz, 1889).
4. Egerton Castle and Agnes Castle, “The Great Todescan’s Secret Thrust,” in Flower o’ the Orange (London: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 226–7.
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