HEMA

Quick Facts

Masters & notable people

Johannes LiechtenauerWestern European Masters

Country of OriginGermany

RegionEurope

Primary FocusWeapons

Contact LevelFull contact

Character & Origin

Organisation & Competition

What the style is built from

Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.

Catalogs & Databases for HEMA

About HEMA

HEMA stands for Historical European Martial Arts. It does not name a single school or an unbroken lineage but a present-day movement that reconstructs European fighting systems from surviving written sources. Most of those traditions died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; what remains of them are manuscripts and printed manuals from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, from the oldest surviving European fencing manuscript, I.33, through the circle of Johannes Liechtenauer and the Italian masters Fiore dei Liberi and Achille Marozzo, to later English and French authors. Reconstruction therefore takes the form of scholarly work: transcribing and translating the source, interpreting its terminology, attempting the technique and testing it in free play with protective equipment. The longsword, the messer, rapier and dagger, the smallsword, the sabre, the staff, wrestling and armoured combat are all practised. The movement took shape in the 1990s, and the decisive impulse was the digitisation of the manuscripts, which put the sources into the hands of researchers everywhere. This page therefore lists no founder and no year of origin; Liechtenauer and the other masters are sources, not founders of HEMA. Today HEMA works as an international network of clubs with its own tournaments and a critical attitude towards its own interpretations.

Styles & Branches

Similar styles

Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.