The Art of Swordfighting in Earnest

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK AND EBOOK EDITION

The Art of Sword Fighting in Earnest was originally published as a full colour hardback, with a facsimile of the manuscript bound in. That book is expensive to print, and the colour facsimile is already available as a separate standalone book (De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, isbn: 978-952-7157-09-1), so I decided to produce this black and white paperback and ebook version so that you have a much cheaper print option to throw into your fencing bag without worrying about messing it up, and you can have the book on your e-reader or phone and take it with you wherever you go. Vadi in your pocket— what could be better?

The only change to the text has been in the first page of the Introduction where I mention the facsimile; that has been cut, for obvious reasons, but the rest of the book is identical.

The introduction to this book does have a considerable number of photographs in it, which look much better in colour, so I have uploaded them to my website, and you can download them free from here: www.guywindsor.net/blog/vadipics/

I hope you enjoy the book!

Guy Windsor, Ipswich June 2018

INTRODUCTION

Ms Vitt. Em. 1324, known as De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, is a small illustrated treatise composed in the late fifteenth century by Philippo Vadi, which survives in one known copy dedicated to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. It covers combat on foot with the sword, with the spear and with the dagger, both in and out of armour. I published a translation, transcription and commentary of this manuscript in 2012, titled Veni Vadi Vici.1 The book you are holding is the revised second edition of Veni Vadi Vici, which went through so many changes that I have gone so far as to re-title it. In this edition, I have provided an introduction, which briefly surveys the history of recreating historical European martial arts, and covers everything currently known about Vadi himself and the provenance and structure of his book; it also covers key details regarding the dedicatee, and it has some notes on Italian fencing terms of the fifteenth century. This is followed by a complete translation (correcting the errors in the first edition), and a section of commentary giving my perspective on the text as a modern swordsman and researcher. And finally, this edition includes a glossary of the main technical fencing terms that Vadi used.

The purpose of this book is to provide a useful resource to practitioners of medieval and Renaissance Italian swordsmanship, enabling them to recreate Vadi’s art with confidence, and to provide a new light with which to view other Italian sources. To make this book accessible to a general reader (and to swordsmanship beginners) I have included some introductory material that will be unnecessary to an experienced practitioner, but I think it better to err on the side of providing too much help rather than too little. This edition will also be useful to scholars of the quattrocento, especially as an example of ‘research through practice’.

Not a great deal is known about De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi or its author, and it does not appear to have been very influential in its time. It survives in only one manuscript which lay forgotten by everyone except a few manuscript collectors from the time it was written until quite recently, when a surge of interest in the ‘lost’ martial arts of Europe brought it to light. This surge was part of a larger pattern: beginning in the late 1980s, there has been a revival of interest in recreating medieval and Renaissance arts of various kinds. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, which was opened in 1997 close to the site of the original theatre. Not content with recreating the physical theatre, the Globe’s organisers are now offering performances with the original pronunciation (or as close to it as scholarship can develop). Similarly, contemporary musicians have recorded classical, baroque and medieval music on reproductions of historical instruments, which sound very different to their modern counterparts. There is an entire academic/musical field now assembled under the umbrella of ‘Historically Informed Performance’.2 The process requires musicological scholarship, but also high-level practical skills in playing, and a restoration of the ancient arts of instrument-making. To some extent then, the movement to recreate historical martial arts is part of a larger trend.

There was a previous revival of the old martial arts of Europe that occurred in the late nineteenth century, and which required a similar mix of academic and practical skills. With the Victorian nostalgia for the ‘old ways’, scholars and classical fencers such as Alfred Hutton, Egerton Castle and Cyril Matthey discovered treatises on fencing dating back to the sixteenth century. Using those treatises, they recreated the systems of combat they found within and organised public demonstrations of the new, old, art. This movement eventually ran out of steam, but it left behind several excellent books such as Castle’s Schools and Masters of Fence (1892), Matthey’s edition of George Silver’s Brief Instructions on my Paradoxes of Defence (1898), Hutton’s The Sword and the Centuries (1901), and others. Classical fencing (with foil, epée and sabre) remained and developed into the modern sport.

Late in the twentieth century, with the Victorians’s legacy as a starting point, various groups in Europe and the Americas began again to recreate these arts. The earliest glimmerings of this trend with regard to swordsmanship can be seen in Turner and Soper’s 1990 book, Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay, which reproduces and compares three English-language fencing treatises from the late 1500s. By 1992, the first publishing company dedicated to the subject was founded: Chivalry Bookshelf began with a quarterly magazine, but by 1996 was producing books aimed at the historical swordsmanship practitioner. Other notable publications in the field at this time were Terry Brown’s 1997 English Martial Arts and, a year later, Medieval Swordsmanship, by John Clements. The idea of accurately recreating historical swordsmanship styles from existing texts had hit a nerve. Groups began springing up independently of each other: when I founded the Edinburgh-based Dawn Duellist’s Society in 1994, I had no idea that there were people in other countries interested in the same pursuit.

With the help of the newly-available internet, local, national and international bodies began to form (such as the British Federation for Historical Swordplay, founded in 1998) and major conferences were organised; the first of which was the Swordplay Symposium International, which was held in Houston, Texas, in May 2000. This was followed by the International Swordfighting and Martial Arts Convention in Lansing, Michigan, in September of the same year. Since then, there has been an explosion of interest, with literally dozens of events every year, and a natural division of the field into areas of interest (such as weapon or combat style), preferred training foci (such as tournaments or re-enactment), and methodologies.

This has led to De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi being studied not just as an artefact, but as a source for a recreated martial practice. I have prepared this translation and commentary on the manuscript to assist scholars and practitioners in this field. Vadi’s work is extremely important because it is the earliest source we have in any language that describes the principles of swordsmanship in exact terms. All prior sources provide some textual instructions, and usually a swathe of techniques, more or less well organised, but do not usually define terms such as ‘feint’, or provide written instructions regarding choosing a sword, or how to deal with multiple opponents, and so on.3 Vadi does, at length, and while the relevance of his definitions, principles and opinions for the study of other masters’ styles is a matter for caution and debate, the very fact that he was the first person we know of to write them down makes his work a vital milestone in the representation of martial arts in written sources. This may be why his work has received more attention in the form of modern editions and translations from modern practitioners than other, more technically diverse and complete sources. I will address these other treatments of Vadi below, but first a word about the author himself.

1 Many readers were baffled by the title. It’s a play on Julius Caesar’s famous despatch, veni vidi vici, I came, I saw, I conquered. I meant to convey I came, I used Vadi’s awesome system, I conquered.

2 For information regarding this movement’s early stages, see Kenyon and Sherman.

3 There are some exceptions – which I will address in due course – in which a few specific terms are defined in earlier works, but the fact remains that Vadi is unique in his thorough approach to laying out the principles of his art.

Philippo Vadi: who was he?

Ubaldo Vadi and Andrea Conti have written a fascinating history of the Vadi family (motivated no doubt by Ubaldo being a member of it), Cenni Storici della Famiglia Vadi (Vadi, Ubaldo, 2014). The authors suggest that Vadi lived from 1425 to 1501, and was governor of Reggio from 1452 to 1470. The article is especially useful because it shows a bronze medallion forged in 1457 by Giovanni Boldù. On its reverse, it has a picture of Vadi holding a sword by handle and blade; he has a sun by his right foot and a tower by his left, and he’s standing on a millwheel, just as depicted on f15r.

Fig. 1: the Boldù medallion

Fig. 2: the ‘segno’ on f15r

It is interesting to note that the medallion was struck some 25 years before the earliest dating of the manuscript, suggesting that the trope was already part of Vadi’s identity, and not created just for the book. This assumes, of course, that this is the same Philippo Vadi. Given the exact reproduction of the trope of the millwheel, sun and tower, I think it’s very likely that it is the same man, who would have been at least 57 years old when the book was presented to Guidobaldo.

The page also cites Storia dei Conti e Duchi d’Urbino by Filippo Ugolini, which states that a Benedetto Vadi di Fossombrone worked at the court as a doctor of law and jurisprudence between 1480 and 1516. This would seem the most likely connection between Philippo and the Duke; Benedetto was presumably a relative and probably undertook to present Vadi, though we have no record of that.

Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino

Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the dedicatee of Vadi’s work, was born on 17 January 1472, in Gubbio, a town about 60km south of Urbino. His parents were Federico da Montefeltro and Elisabetta Gonzaga, Duke and Duchess of Urbino. They were immortalised in this famous diptych portrait by Piero della Francesca. The strange shape of Federico’s nose came from a jousting accident, in which he lost the bridge of his nose and his right eye.

Fig. 3: Federico and Elisabetta, by Piero della Francesca

You can see the portrait in the Uffizi gallery, in Florence. Guido’s mother gave birth to eight children; she had seven daughters and then Guido, her only son. She died in childbirth with him when she was 26. The portrait was commissioned by the Duke in 1474, as a memorial to his wife.

Fig. 4: Guido with his father in the study

This charming image of Federico and his son Guido was painted in approximately 1475 by Justus van Gent or Pedro Berruguete. It hangs in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, Italy. Federico is at work in his study, with the Garter insignia pictured (he was a knight in the Order of the Garter, the highest order of knighthood in England; he is wearing the garter on his extended left leg). Note the armour, the sword and, of course, the book. According to Marcello Simonetta, the Duke is reading Saint Gregory the Great’s Commentary on the Book of Job. Simonetta bases his identification on the binding and the size of the book (Morgan Library, 2007). It is worth noting that Guidobaldo would have been a toddler when the painting was done, so is probably not painted to scale with his father.

Fig. 5: Guidobaldo da Montefeltro

This boy in the picture, then, is the one who became Duke in 1482, aged only 10. He had a famous condottiere father, no mother, and probably a deep and abiding interest in the art of combat. He became a famous condottiere in his own right despite being not a hale man; he suffered from impotence, and died in 1508 at the age of 36. It is worth noting that Guido was sufficiently well-respected in his own time that he achieved the highest military honour in the Papal states, the rank of Gonfaloniere della Chiesa (bestowed in 1504 by Pope Julius II)1, was a Knight of the Garter, and no less a writer than Pietro Bembo (who lived at Urbino from 1506 to 1512), wrote his biography published in 1555, Vita dello illustrissimo s. Guidobaldo duca d’Vrbino. E della illustriss. sig. Helisabetta Gonzaga sua consorte (Life of his Grace Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, and of her Grace Helisabetta Gonzaga, his Consort). His court was the model for Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (in which Pietro Bembo is a recurring figure) begun in 1508 and published in 1528. Guidobaldo’s physical frailty may have motivated Vadi’s emphasis on how every trained and clever man of good intelligence overtakes and surpasses any other that is stouter and stronger than him (from the Introduction, f2v).

You can see Raphael’s portrait of him from around 1506, and a portrait that was painted perhaps a year or so earlier of his wife Elisabetta, in the Uffizi gallery.

Fig. 6: Elisabetta Gonzaga

Some time before he turned 15, Guido was given De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi and had it bound and placed in his library. We have no record of how it was given or received but it is reasonable to think that this teenage boy would have been delighted by the gift.

1 This has been called into question by C. H. Clough and A. Conti in their article Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duca di Urbino: fu mai gonfaloniere di Sancta Romana Ecclesia? (Guidobaldo da Montefeltro was never Gonfalonier of the Holy Roman Church?) in Studi Montefeltrani, n. 27, San Leo, 2006.

The Manuscript

The manuscript is in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma, Fondo Vittorio Emanuele, catalogued as Codice 1324. It was written between 1482 and 1487. It