German School of Fencing
A fencing tradition that manuscripts of the 14th to 16th century trace to master Johannes Liechtenauer. His verse teaching was glossed by pupils and is reconstructed today by HEMA.
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About German School of Fencing
The German school of fencing is a tradition that fencing manuscripts trace to master Johannes Liechtenauer. Neue Deutsche Biographie (1985) lists him as a fencing master of the mid-14th century who was already dead in 1389. According to the NDB, no records survive from him personally, and the only meagre biographical source is a fragment by his pupil Hanko Döbringer.
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According to the NDB, Liechtenauer was the first practitioner of fencing to compile a coherent set of simple rhymed rules for serious combat with knightly weapons. The rules were meant for oral transmission and deliberately written in obscure and veiled words so that only the initiated would understand them. The oldest manuscript with his teaching, Hs. 3227a, Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, is dated by Handschriftencensus to around 1389. It contains Liechtenauer's teaching on the longsword and wrestling and texts on fencing with the shield, the staff, the long knife and the dagger. According to the NDB, all the important manuscripts follow with prose glosses and seek a link to Liechtenauer, and even 17th-century prints cite him as an authority. Sigmund Ringeck provided his verses with extensive practical commentaries, and his teaching passed into the manuscript of Peter von Danzig. According to Jaquet (Acta Periodica Duellatorum, 2015), the tradition of fencing books comprises more than seventy manuscripts from the 14th to the mid-16th century. According to the NDB, Ringeck's techniques are very popular with today's groups of historical martial arts.
History
Neue Deutsche Biographie (Wierschin 1985) lists Johannes Liechtenauer as a fencing master of the mid-14th century who was already dead in 1389. According to Hanko's fragment he was educated, noble origin cannot be ruled out, he apparently served at Upper German courts for a time and later lived in some large Upper German city with a small circle of pupils. According to the NDB, Hanko stresses that the art is not Liechtenauer's invention but an art devised many hundreds of years earlier, which the master got to know on long journeys and arranged into a system.
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The oldest manuscript with the teaching, Hs. 3227a, Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, has 169 leaves according to Handschriftencensus and is a Latin-German compilation with technical, medical and astrological texts and several fencing teachings. It is dated to around 1389. Liechtenauer's pupil Hanko Döbringer was long wrongly regarded as its scribe, a correction is offered by Cermann (2014). Green (2001) and the NDB still regard him as the author of the 1389 text. The German Wikipedia, referring to Leiske (2018), considers that Liechtenauer may still have been alive at the time of the record. According to the NDB (Leng 2010), Sigmund Ringeck served as fencing master to Duke Albrecht of Bavaria, and his teaching, the oldest record of the fencing art after Liechtenauer, passed into the manuscript of Peter von Danzig. Jaquet and Walczak (Acta Periodica Duellatorum, 2015) state that besides glosses on Liechtenauer's fighting in armour and on horseback, teachings attributed to Andreas Liegnitzer, Martin Hundsfeld or Lew the Jew circulate in manuscripts of 1452 to 1570. According to them they come from a single manuscript, not from an oral tradition, and for over a hundred years they were copied almost verbatim.
How it differs
Green (2001) states that Fiore dei Liberi, whose Flos Duellatorum according to him first appeared in 1410, offers a contrast to exclusively German systems, and that dei Liberi originally studied under German masters. Green also writes that Liechtenauer apparently studied under older masters, such as Lamprecht of Bohemia, Virgily of Kraków and Liegnitzer of Silesia. Jaquet and Walczak (2015) state that Paulus Kal's list of masters, the so-called Liechtenauer society, is considered fictitious by Thomas Stangier (2009). The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1883) still placed Liechtenauer in the mid-15th century, the NDB (1985) already in the mid-14th century.
Technique
According to Green (2001), Liechtenauer called the valued techniques meisterhau, master strikes in which the sword parries the opponent's strike while hitting. He taught that the better fencer seeks the initiative by attacking and that passive defence without a reply is worse and leads to defeat. According to Green, German masters expressed the ideal of stuck und bruch, namely that every technique has a countertechnique and every countertechnique a technique, and knew half-sword fighting, in which a gloved hand grips the blade. English Wikipedia quotes Hs. 3227a, according to which all of master Liechtenauer's art lies in the words vor, nach, swach, stark and Indes. It also states that the teaching divides longsword fighting into seventeen main techniques, including five hidden strikes Zornhau, Krumphau, Zwerchhau, Schielhau and Scheitelhau and four guards Pflug, Ochs, vom Tag and Alber. According to the NDB, Sigmund Ringeck provided the often incomprehensible mnemonic verses of Liechtenauer's models, called zedel, with extensive practical commentaries. Separate parts deal with variants of sword fighting and fencing with the buckler. According to Handschriftencensus, Hs. 3227a contains besides the longsword and wrestling texts on fencing with the shield, the staff, the long knife and the dagger.
Training
According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Liechtenauer's rules were intended exclusively for oral transmission. According to the NDB, Ringeck's teaching explicitly addresses princes and lords, so that they might prevail jn schimpf vnd in ernst. According to a study by Gassmann and colleagues (Acta Periodica Duellatorum, 2017), today's HEMA puts great effort into replicas of longswords and of Federn training swords based on museum objects, and otherwise uses modern protective equipment, mainly for safety reasons.
Competition
According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the fencing school (Fechtschule) associated with Liechtenauer's name cannot be understood as an educational institution. These were occasional public events at which fencers demonstrated their skills. Dupuis (Acta Periodica Duellatorum, 2015) describes the rules of a fencing tournament from the Strasbourg archive, datable to roughly 1470 to 1471. The bout ended with the first hit, and prizes went to the two fencers with the highest and bloodiest hits. According to Jaquet (2015), the rules announced before the Fechtschule prohibited, among other things, stabbing, striking with the pommel, entering the bout, breaking arms, striking the groin, gouging out eyes and throwing stones. They correspond to the forbidden techniques that the glossators of Liechtenauer's teaching have described since 1452 in the section Kampffechten. According to Gassmann and colleagues (2017), today's HEMA longsword tournaments have the whole body as the target area, a hit must be noticeable, and a successful counter-hit counts in full or in part. The rules differ from tournament to tournament.
Today
The doctrine is today reconstructed by the HEMA movement. A HEMA census in Acta Periodica Duellatorum (Fürgut, 2021) recorded 3186 practitioners at 124 locations in Germany and 801 practitioners at 34 locations in Austria. The longsword is the most popular discipline and is practiced at more than 88 percent of locations in both countries. According to the author, the German association Deutscher Dachverband für Historisches Fechten is seeking admission to the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund. According to Jaquet and Walczak (2015), Hans-Peter Hils (1985) was the first after Martin Wierschin (1965) to apply philological methods to a broad body of fencing books, aimed mainly at the transmission of the art founded by Liechtenauer. English Wikipedia states that the first attempts to reconstruct European fighting systems began in the late 19th century and that from the nineteen-eighties and nineties Patri J. Pugliese made copies of historical treatises available.
Did you know
The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1883) quotes the opening verse of Liechtenauer's teaching, Jung Ritter, lehre Gott lieb haben, Frauen jo ehre. According to the NDB (Leng 2010), the name Ringeck arose from a misreading. The manuscripts have the forms Sigmund ain ringeck, sigmund amring, sigmund schninig and Sigmund Emring.
Styles & Branches
Wrestling of the German martial art of the 14th to 16th century. Taught with the sword, one manual is attributed to master Ott, and the first wrestling print appeared around 1507.
Fencing according to the Strasbourg master Joachim Meyer, who in 1570 published a printed book on the sword, dussack, rapier, dagger, staff and halberd. His manuscripts also survive.
Fencing with a curved weapon called the dussack, often wooden, which Joachim Meyer described in 1570 as preparing pupils for rapier. Some HEMA groups practise it today.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Johannes Liechtenauer?
A fencing master from whom the German manuscripts derive their tradition. The Neue Deutsche Biographie places him in the mid-14th century and states that he was no longer alive in 1389. None of his own writings have survived.
Why is Liechtenauer's teaching written in an incomprehensible way?
According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, it was meant for oral transmission and deliberately written in dark, concealed words so that only the initiated would understand it. According to the NDB, all important manuscripts gave it prose glosses, and Sigmund Ringeck, for example, wrote extensive commentaries on it.
How old is the oldest manuscript of the German school?
The Handschriftencensus dates the manuscript Hs. 3227a from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg to around 1389. It contains Liechtenauer's teaching on the longsword and wrestling and other fencing texts.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.