Armizare (Fiore dei Liberi)
The fighting art of master Fiore dei Liberi, documented by a manuscript of 1409. It covers wrestling, dagger, sword, axe and mounted combat.
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About Armizare (Fiore dei Liberi)
Armizare is the collective name for the fighting art taught in northern Italy at the turn of the fifteenth century by master Fiore dei Liberi of Cividale del Friuli. The year 1409 stands here as a firm datable point, but one needs to know what it means: it is not the year the art was "founded" but the date of the dedication of the manuscript Flos Duellatorum. By then Fiore had been teaching for decades, and in his preface he says he learned from Italian and German masters and fought five times against jealous rivals, each time without armour and with a sharp dagger. The syllabus is arranged as a progression from the simplest to the complex, and this is what distinguishes it from later specialised manuals. It begins with abrazare, wrestling without weapons; from it proceeds the dagger, because Fiore understands the dagger as wrestling with a blade in hand. Then come the sword in one and in two hands, the sword in armour, the axe, the spear, and finally mounted combat. The principles stay the same across weapons — the implement changes, not the mechanics. A characteristic device is the system of four animals, assigning a fighter's qualities to concrete images: the lynx for sight and measure, the lion for courage, the elephant for strength and stability, the tiger for speed. Beside it stand the seven swords, a scheme of striking directions laid out around the human figure. Four manuscripts survive in two redactions, held today in the Getty Museum and the Morgan Library among others. It is precisely their number and their pictorial form that make armizare one of the most reconstructable medieval fighting traditions and the basis of a substantial part of today's HEMA.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.