Open Fior di Battaglia at the beginning, past the Segno page with its four animals, past Fiore's proud dedication, and the first weapon you meet is no weapon at all. Two men in tunics. No swords, no daggers, no armour. Just bodies, and the ways one body can move another body against its will.
This is abrazare. The word comes from the Italian abbracciare, to embrace, and that is exactly what the art is. An embrace that takes your opponent to the ground. Fiore placed it first in his book for a reason that becomes clearer the deeper you study him. Grappling is not one of the things Fiore teaches. Grappling is the thing underneath everything else he teaches.
The Universal Theme
The grappling section of Fior di Battaglia contains sixteen plays. That sounds modest next to the swordwork, which runs into the hundreds of illustrated techniques. But the sixteen plays are the visible tip of the iceberg. Grappling principles appear in every single later section of the book.
Roughly two thirds of Fiore's plays, across the whole of his system, contain some kind of physical manipulation of the opponent. A dagger play resolves into a throw. A sword play resolves into a bind with a wrist lock. A pollaxe play ends with the opponent on the ground, a foot on their chest, the blade at their throat. Fiore does not treat grappling as the alternative to striking. He treats grappling as the finish of striking. You cut, you thrust, you parry, and then (because a real fight does not end with a single blow) you take your opponent down and make sure they stay down.
This is what distinguishes Fiore from many later fencing traditions. He never loses sight of the close-range reality of the medieval fight. Swords are beautiful and frightening, but a sword fight that does not resolve into a clinch has probably not actually resolved.
The Five Things You Must Do
Fiore's single clearest statement of his grappling-first philosophy comes in the dagger section, and it applies to the whole of his art. He calls it the Five Things.
"Doubt yourself when against anyone with the dangerous knife. The arms, the hands and the elbows must immediately go against it. And to do this, always do these five things. Take the dagger, strike, break the arms, bind them, and put him on the ground. These five plays will not abandon one another."
Listen to what he is saying. Five things you must always do. Not in order, necessarily. Not one after the other like a recipe. In the order the fight offers them to you. "These five plays will not abandon one another." Each one rolls on to any of the others.
The five are:
- Take the weapon. Strip, immobilise, or otherwise neutralise the dangerous thing in their hand.
- Strike. Hit them. Hard enough to disrupt whatever they thought they were doing.
- Break the arms. Attack the joints. Dislocate, hyperextend, disable.
- Bind them. Apply a lock that stops them using that limb again.
- Put him on the ground. Throw, trip, or drive them down.
Four of these five are grappling. Only the second one, the strike, might be something else, and even the strike often lands after the opponent has already been grabbed. This is what Fiore means when he says abrazare is the foundation. The whole logic of his close-range fighting is one of the five things rolling onward to another.
Each of the four grappling things has its own proud little verse in the manuscript. Listen to the voice of a master describing his life's work:
"The broken arms I carry tell my art. I say without a lie that I have broken and dislocated many arms in my life. And against any who choose to go against me, I always want to use my art."
And on the throws:
"You ask me how I put this man under my feet. Thousands have gone there, trying to match my art of grappling. For my victory I carry the palm in the right hand, because none can withstand my grappling skills."
That is Fiore on a page, confident about the hundreds of people he has thrown to the ground, proud about it, and insistent that this is the art you should learn from him. There is no squeamishness, no apology. Grappling is the work, and the work is good.
The Physics of Abrazare
Underneath the five things, underneath the proud declarations, sits a surprisingly modern piece of applied mechanics. Fiore's grappling is not about being stronger than your opponent. It is about leverage.
Try, in the abstract, to ignore your opponent's outward appearance and see them instead as a mobile physics problem. A body of a certain mass, arranged around a centre of gravity, balanced on two feet. A body full of joints, each of which is a potential fulcrum. A body that can be spun, bent, or dropped if you can create the right lever in the right place and hold it there for a single second.
That is what abrazare is doing. Every play is the construction of a mechanical advantage: a fulcrum somewhere close to your own centre, a load somewhere on the opponent, a force applied at the right point along the lever to spin or drop them.
The three classes of lever every schoolchild learns in physics all appear in Fiore's grappling:
- First class levers (fulcrum between force and load), where your shoulder becomes the pivot and the opponent's wrist rotates around it.
- Second class levers (load between fulcrum and force), where your thigh pivots against their hips and their centre of gravity falls over the edge of your stance.
- Third class levers (force between fulcrum and load), where you pin their wrist against your chest and drive at their elbow to break the joint.
Fiore did not write "first class lever" in his manuscript. He did not need to. The plays themselves are the engineering. When you drill the fourth play of the First Master of Grappling, you are executing a second-class lever whether you know it or not. Once you learn to see the leverage, the plays start making sense in a new way. Each one is a puzzle of physics, and the solution is a person on the ground.
The Stable Fulcrum
One principle above all others is worth absorbing. Fiore's grappling works when your fulcrum is stable. If the pivot point of your lever is moving when you try to apply force around it, your lever will slip and your opponent will escape.
This is why so many abrazare plays seem to pin the opponent's limb close to the grappler's own body. Chest, hip, thigh, shoulder. These are all places where you have maximum control of your own structure. If you trap their wrist against your chest, and you can hold your chest still (relative to your own motion), the wrist has become a fixed fulcrum. You can now turn, rotate, and drive force through the elbow or the shoulder with complete mechanical efficiency.
If instead you try to grapple with your arms extended away from your body, your fulcrums are floating. Every movement you make shifts them. Your opponent only has to be slightly stronger than your extended muscles to win the exchange. Close the structure down, bring the contact point close to your centre, and the physics begin to favour you regardless of who weighs more.
This is the single most important piece of practical advice inside Fiore's grappling, and it carries straight through into the dagger, the sword, and every other weapon in his system. Whatever you are holding, hold the fulcrum close.
Abrazare Inside the Sword Fight
Now the most beautiful thing. When you stand in Posta di Donna with a longsword and your opponent's blade meets yours in a bind, your body already knows how to respond because you have trained abrazare. You step offline (Fiore uses grappling footwork here, not fencing footwork). You bring your left hand off the grip and onto the opponent's blade or arm. You close the measure. Your elbow finds their elbow. One of the five things is about to happen.
This is Fiore's zogho stretto, his narrow play, and it is abrazare with a sword still in your hand. The sword makes the threat; the grappling makes the finish. When you see an experienced Fiore practitioner in a bind, their sword is often not doing the winning. Their body is. The sword is the excuse for the body to close the distance, and once the distance is closed, the grappling that lives in the foundation of the art takes over.
The twelve guards make more sense once you know this. The seven blows make more sense once you know this. Even the four virtues at the Segno page make more sense: the Elephant's fortitude, that refusal to kneel or lose the footing, is a grappling virtue dressed up in a longsword poem.
Fiore built his art from the ground. Abrazare is the ground.
What This Means for You
If you are training Fiore, do not skip the grappling. It is tempting. The sword is more exciting. The longsword drills feel like "the real HEMA," and the wrestling feels like something you would do in a judo class. That instinct is a mistake.
Train abrazare and the sword improves. You learn measure through bodies before you learn it through blades. You learn the feel of a stable fulcrum in your hip before you try to build one in the crossing of two longswords. You learn that a lock is a lever, and a throw is a fall over a lever, and a good cut ends in the same clinch your wrestling already taught you.
This is why Steve and Andrew at HEMA Penzance keep the grappling alive in our training. Not as a curiosity section tacked onto the longsword. As the soil the longsword grows out of.
Come and Learn
We practise Fiore's complete system (grappling included) every Tuesday evening at Penzance Leisure Centre, 7pm to 9pm. Your first lesson is free, all equipment is provided, and no experience is necessary. Come along and see for yourself.
Fiore's words in this article are from the Getty manuscript translations at Fight Like Fiore.