"Medieval fencing" is another of those phrases that covers more than it seems to. A peasant's self-defence with a staff; an armoured knight's judicial duel with longsword and dagger; a city-watch sergeant's training with a sword and buckler; a Franciscan monk's instruction in the espada ropera; a student's school bout in the German Fechtschule. All of these were medieval fencing, and they looked very different from each other.
This post is a friendly tour of what medieval fencing actually was, across the centuries it lived in. We will stay in Europe (the "European" in Historical European Martial Arts) and roughly cover the 12th through the 17th centuries, with most attention on the era Fiore dei Liberi lived and taught in (late 14th to early 15th century).
Fencing Meant Combat, Not Sport
The first and most important thing to understand about medieval fencing. The word comes from Old French fens, meaning defence, the art of defending yourself with a weapon. It did not mean competitive sport, though sports did develop within the art. It meant the actual working skill of using a weapon to survive.
Medieval people did not have a sharp distinction between "martial art" and "practical fighting." A man trained in longsword expected to use that training if he ever had to defend himself, challenge someone to a duel, or go to war. Sport and combat lived on the same continuum. When Fiore trained Galeazzo Gonzaga for his famous 1395 duel with Boucicaut, the training was not preparation for a staged event. It was preparation for a fight that could (and nearly did) end in serious injury.
This shapes how we should read the medieval sources. When Fiore tells us a guard "breaks the others with the great blows that she can make," he is telling us a technical fact about real combat outcomes, not a dramatic flourish. The art is serious because the stakes were.
The Main Contexts
Medieval fencing lived in several distinct contexts, each with its own weapons, techniques, and culture.
The Battlefield
The context most modern readers imagine first, but also the context medieval fencing manuals pay least attention to. Battlefield fighting was massed combat, usually with polearms (spears, pikes, halberds, pollaxes) as primary weapons, bows and crossbows at range, and swords as secondary sidearms.
Sword work on a battlefield was rarely subtle. Formation fighting, pressing forward in a line, exchanging blows across shield walls. The technical material in the manuscripts is mostly about duel-style combat, not battlefield combat. Knights carried their longswords into battle but drew them mainly for close-in work once the lines had broken.
The Judicial Duel
The context Fiore and his peers documented most fully. Formal single combat under rules, usually to settle a legal or honour question, with both fighters armoured and armed according to a specified weapon list.
A full armoured duel might include mounted lance, dismounted pollaxe, longsword in armour, and dagger, in sequence. Fiore's student Giovannino da Baggio fought exactly such a duel in 1399: three bouts of mounted lance, three each of pollaxe, estoc, and dagger. Thirteen bouts total. This was the context his manuscript prepared fighters for.
Judicial duelling was legal, regulated, and mostly non-fatal when armour was good and weapons were blunted, though injuries happened. The social significance was large: a duel's outcome could reshape a family's honour, settle a legal dispute, or make a mercenary captain's reputation.
The Civilian Duel
Less formal than the judicial duel, and more common. Two gentlemen (or two townsmen) disagree. Swords come out. The fight happens in a street, a courtyard, a field outside the town walls. Sometimes seconds were present; sometimes not. Sometimes the authorities cared; often they did not.
Civilian duelling used lighter weapons than armoured judicial combat. Arming swords, later sideswords, and (from the 16th century) rapiers were the typical civilian sidearms. The fighting was quicker, less armour-focused, and often fatal. Fiore himself fought five civilian duels in his life, against unworthy masters who envied his art. He won all five unharmed.
The Fencing School
The German Fechtschule and its Italian and French counterparts. A school where paying students learned fencing from a master. The curriculum depended on the master and the region, but a typical school might teach longsword, dagger, wrestling, and sometimes specialised weapons like the messer or the pollaxe.
Fiore ran fencing schools through much of his career, as did most of the named masters of the period. The manuscripts we study today are essentially the curricula of these schools preserved in writing, either as teaching aids for the master himself or as presentation copies for noble patrons.
The Tournament
Tournaments were partly combat, partly sport, and partly public spectacle. In the earlier medieval period, they were closer to real warfare, with mass cavalry melees and serious casualties. By Fiore's time, they had become more regulated, with blunted weapons, judged outcomes, and (for serious noble tournaments) elaborate ceremonies.
Tournament fencing used many of the same techniques as duelling but with different emphases. Showmanship mattered more. Clear-to-read technical displays were valued alongside pure effectiveness. The fencing at a Fiore-era noble tournament would have been impressive to watch but slightly less lethal than the same techniques in a judicial duel.
The Masters and Their Manuscripts
Medieval fencing knowledge was preserved in written form by a handful of masters. The most important surviving manuscripts include:
Royal Armouries MS I.33 (late 13th century). The earliest known European fencing manuscript. Illustrated sword-and-buckler plays from a German Franciscan context. Remarkably, it shows a priest and his pupil as the demonstrators.
Fiore dei Liberi's Fior di Battaglia (early 1400s). The Getty, Morgan, Pisani Dossi, and Paris versions together document the complete Italian armizare system: grappling, dagger, one-handed sword, longsword, sword in armour, pollaxe, spear, and mounted combat.
Hans Talhoffer's Fechtbücher (mid-1400s, multiple versions). German master's illustrated fight books covering longsword, dagger, judicial duels, armoured combat, and other material. Striking illustrations but less textual detail than Fiore.
The Liechtenauer glosses (1400s). Pseudo-Peter von Danzig, Sigmund Ringeck, and others commented extensively on Liechtenauer's Zettel, producing the main body of German longsword teaching.
Paulus Kal's Fechtbuch (1450s). Another important German manuscript, beautifully illustrated.
Filippo Vadi's De Arte Gladiatoria (1480s). An Italian follow-on to Fiore, with some direct borrowing and some original material.
Later Renaissance and Baroque treatises by masters like Pietro Monte, Camillo Agrippa, Achille Marozzo, Ridolfo Capo Ferro, Salvator Fabris, and Joachim Meyer extend the fencing tradition into the 16th and 17th centuries.
This is not an exhaustive list. Dozens of other manuscripts survive, each preserving a slightly different window into medieval and renaissance European fighting arts.
What the Fencing Actually Looked Like
If you could step into a time machine and watch Fiore teaching a longsword class in Ferrara around 1405, you would see something that looks more like a modern HEMA training session than you might expect.
Students drilling paired techniques at measured speeds. The master walking between pairs, correcting. Blunted practice swords (sometimes steel, sometimes wood). Less protective gear than modern HEMA uses, but some: padded gambesons, leather gloves, occasional face protection for harder sparring.
The techniques would look recognisable too. The twelve guards are the twelve guards. The seven blows travel the same lines. The exchange of thrusts resolves the same way. Training footwork is passing steps driven from the hips. When two students cross blades, the bind plays out according to the same structural principles modern HEMA practitioners rediscover every Tuesday evening.
What you would notice missing from a modern class: electrified scoring gear, video analysis, printed handouts, the internet itself. But the core of the practice, two people learning to fence from an experienced master using repeatable drills, is continuous across the centuries.
The Long Silence
Then, gradually, medieval fencing faded. Not all at once but over decades.
Firearms. By the early 1500s, gunpowder weapons were changing warfare fundamentally. Plate armour was increasingly obsolete by the 1600s. Massed infantry replaced armoured cavalry. Sword skill still mattered, but the context shifted.
Civilian duelling changes. The longsword went out of civilian fashion as lighter, thrust-focused swords (rapiers, then smallswords) became the gentleman's sidearm. Different fencing traditions evolved around these weapons.
Sport specialisation. By the 1700s and 1800s, fencing schools increasingly taught sport-oriented foil and sabre, with the fuller medieval tradition receding. The art became a refined duelling pastime rather than a general martial practice.
Industrialisation and urban life. As European societies industrialised, the cultural role of edged weapons diminished. A 1900 English gentleman did not carry a sword. His grandfather had.
By 1950, no one living had learned longsword from an unbroken teaching lineage. The manuscripts were in libraries, occasionally studied by historians, almost never by fighters.
The Modern Revival
Then, starting in the 1990s, a scattered group of enthusiasts decided to read the manuscripts and try to reconstruct the art. This is the movement that became HEMA. It grew through the 2000s and 2010s into an international community with tournaments, peer-reviewed interpretations, and clubs in dozens of countries.
Medieval fencing, as a living discipline, is perhaps thirty years old in its modern form. But the techniques it practises are six centuries old or older. When we train armizare at HEMA Penzance, we are working from Fiore's direct instructions, illustrated by Fiore's scribes, written in Fiore's Italian, and we are practising the same guards and the same blows that trained the condottieri of his age.
Medieval fencing died. Medieval fencing came back. The present moment of historical swordsmanship is a quiet, surprising revival of something that looked lost for centuries.
Come and Train
HEMA Penzance trains Fiore's complete system 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.
Medieval fencing is not a museum piece. It is a practice. The sword is in your hands as soon as you walk in.