If you could pick up one book and hold the heart of Fiore dei Liberi's art in your hands, it would be this one. MS Ludwig XV 13, held today in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Known universally in the HEMA community as the Getty manuscript, or simply the Getty.

This is the book that most modern Fiore practitioners primarily work from. The manuscript that gets photographed, scanned, translated, and argued over in HEMA study groups worldwide. The source behind every post on this blog that quotes Fiore directly.

And it is genuinely beautiful.

What the Getty Manuscript Actually Is

The Getty is one of several surviving copies of Fiore's Fior di Battaglia (The Flower of Battle), composed in the early 1400s. Fiore wrote his book once, but it was copied across multiple surviving manuscripts during his lifetime and the decades just after. Four main versions survive:

  • MS Ludwig XV 13 (the Getty), at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
  • MS M.383 (the Morgan), at the Morgan Library in New York.
  • The Pisani Dossi MS (also called Flos Duellatorum), in private Italian hands.
  • MS Latin 11269 (the Paris), at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Each of these has slightly different content, different illustrations, and different quirks. Scholars compare them to reconstruct what Fiore probably actually taught. But the Getty is the one most modern practitioners primarily use, for two reasons: the illustrations are the most complete and the highest quality, and the text is in Fiore's own Italian vernacular rather than the Latin of the Paris version.

The Book Itself

The physical Getty manuscript is a codex of about 47 folios (94 pages), measuring roughly 285 by 205 millimetres. It is written on vellum (prepared animal skin) in Fiore's Italian, with full-colour illustrations on nearly every page showing two or more figures executing a specific fighting play.

The script is a late-medieval Italian hand, neat and legible. The illustrations use vibrant reds, blues, greens, and gold leaf, and they show the plays with a directness that most modern martial arts illustrations lack. The fighters in the plates are named by their role (Master, Scholar, Player, or Attacker), and Fiore's text speaks in the first person for each position.

There is a Segno page at the heart of the manuscript where a central scholar is surrounded by seven swords and four animals representing the virtues of the fighter. This single illuminated page is probably the most reproduced image from the entire work, printed and reprinted on HEMA club logos, t-shirts, and blog headers across the world.

How the Getty Survived

The manuscript's history is a quiet miracle. Written in the early 1400s, it passed through Italian libraries and private hands across the centuries, nearly vanishing more than once. The specific path from 1410 to the present is not perfectly documented, but we can trace significant waypoints.

The manuscript was part of the collection of Peter Ludwig (hence "Ludwig") in Aachen, Germany, before being acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The Getty has owned it since the 1980s, and has made high-resolution digital scans of every page freely available to scholars and the HEMA community.

This free availability is the reason the Getty has become the dominant modern Fiore source. Every HEMA practitioner can study the manuscript from their own home. Every translator can verify their work against the original imagery. The democratisation of the source material is one of the quiet, beautiful things the Getty Museum has done for historical martial arts.

What the Getty Teaches

The Getty is structured roughly like this:

  • Preface and dedication. Fiore explains who he is, who trained him, what the book covers, and dedicates the work to his patron (in the Getty version, the Marquis of Ferrara).
  • The Segno page. The symbolic heart of the work.
  • Abrazare (grappling). Six masters and their plays.
  • Baton and dagger. Short introductory weapon work.
  • Dagger (daga). Nine remedy masters and their scholars, the largest single weapon section.
  • Sword vs dagger. Mixed weapon plays.
  • Sword in one hand. A master and his scholars.
  • Sword in two hands. The famous longsword section, including the twelve guards, the seven blows, wide play and narrow play.
  • Sword in armour. Half-swording and the armoured duel.
  • Pollaxe (azza). Six guards and their plays.
  • Spear on foot. Five guards.
  • Horseback combat. Lance, sword, and grappling from the saddle.
  • Endpiece. A brief closing section.

Every play in the manuscript has its own illustration and its own text. The illustrations show the position or the motion; the text explains what is happening, how to do it, and (sometimes) what to do against it. This twin-track approach (visual plus verbal) is one of the things that makes the Getty such a rich source. If the text is ambiguous, look at the picture. If the picture is unclear, read the text. They resolve each other.

The Getty vs the Other Manuscripts

Modern HEMA scholarship treats the Getty as the default but cross-references with the others. Here are the main differences:

The Pisani Dossi is shorter and more compressed. It uses verse rather than prose for the commentary, often in rhyming couplets. The illustrations are less detailed than the Getty's but still clearly by a skilled artist. It covers the same material in less space.

The Morgan (MS M.383) is similar in content to the Getty but with fewer illustrations and somewhat different textual choices. It is probably an earlier or parallel version of the same core material.

The Paris manuscript (MS Latin 11269) is written in Latin rather than Italian, suggesting it was prepared for a different (probably scholarly or clerical) audience. The content overlaps but differs in places.

When Fiore practitioners disagree about interpretation, the disagreement often comes down to which manuscript emphasises which detail. A responsible modern interpretation draws on all of them.

Why It Matters That You Can See It

One of the genuinely moving things about studying Fiore is that the primary source is not lost. It is not paraphrased. It is not filtered through someone else. You can look at the same page Fiore looked at when he checked the scribe's work six hundred years ago. The red ink of an illuminated capital that someone ground, mixed, and applied in the early 1400s still glows on the vellum.

When you drill a play at HEMA Penzance, and you want to understand exactly what Fiore is telling you, you can open the Getty's digital scan on your phone and look at the exact image that generations of fighters have worked from. The source is not a reconstruction. It is a preserved manuscript, directly available, six centuries deep.

This is rare in medieval martial arts. Many traditions survive only through later secondary sources, reconstructions, or scattered fragments. Fiore's art survives in a complete illuminated book, sitting in a museum in Los Angeles, freely viewable online.

How to Access the Getty Today

The Getty Museum has published high-resolution scans of every page of MS Ludwig XV 13 on their website, free to view and download for personal study. The Wiktenauer wiki also hosts the Getty images alongside multiple modern translations, making it the single best research starting point for any Fiore student.

For focused translations with commentary, the Fight Like Fiore blog works through the Getty play by play and is an excellent companion resource for beginners.

For printed editions, several modern publications reproduce the Getty with accompanying English translation and scholarly notes. Colin Hatcher's, Tom Leoni's, and Guy Windsor's editions are all widely respected starting points.

The Beautiful Paradox

Here is the thing. The Getty manuscript was almost certainly not the book Fiore himself wrote with his own pen. It is a copy, made for a patron, probably by scribes and illuminators in Fiore's circle or under his supervision. The text is his (or very close to his), the plays are his, but the physical object is a beautiful presentation copy.

That copy, however, is what preserved his art. The original he wrote is lost. The presentation copies are what remained. And the Getty's specific presentation copy happens to be the most complete, beautifully illustrated, and scholar-accessible version of the book that Fiore's students and patrons valued enough to copy in the first place.

So when you read the Getty, you are reading not Fiore's first draft but the version of his teaching that was loved enough to be made beautiful and preserved. The copy outlives the original. The teaching outlives the teacher. The book is on display in California because people in 1410 thought the work was worth the vellum and the gold leaf, and people ever since have agreed.

Six hundred years later, we still agree.

Come and Practise the Art the Getty Preserves

We train the material from the Getty manuscript 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.

Quotes and translations of Fiore's work on this site are primarily drawn from the Getty manuscript via Fight Like Fiore.