When modern HEMA practitioners talk about Fiore dei Liberi's manuscripts, the Getty gets almost all the attention. It is the most complete, most beautifully illustrated, most widely studied copy of Fior di Battaglia. For most working practitioners, the Getty is Fiore.

But there is a second version, held not in Los Angeles but in New York, that matters just as much for anyone serious about understanding the art. MS M.383, in the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue. Commonly known in the HEMA world as the Morgan manuscript.

This post is a friendly introduction to the Morgan. What it contains, how it differs from the Getty, and why reading both matters.

The Two Manuscripts, Side by Side

Fiore wrote his book once, probably sometime in the first decade of the 1400s. But the book was copied across multiple presentation versions for different patrons and collectors, and four main copies survived to the present:

  • MS Ludwig XV 13 (the Getty): the most complete illustrated version, held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
  • MS M.383 (the Morgan): a shorter version with fewer illustrations, held at the Morgan Library in New York.
  • The Pisani Dossi MS: a verse version held privately in Italy.
  • MS Latin 11269: a Latin-language version at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

The Morgan is the other major Italian-vernacular version alongside the Getty. Both preserve Fiore's work in his own language (medieval Italian), both cover the same overall curriculum, and both were made within a few decades of Fiore's lifetime. But they differ in important details.

What the Morgan Contains

The Morgan manuscript, like the Getty, covers Fiore's complete system: grappling, dagger, sword in one and two hands, sword in armour, pollaxe, spear, and mounted combat. The overall structure is similar.

But the Morgan is shorter. It has fewer folios (31 compared to the Getty's 47), fewer illustrations, and less text. Some sections are more condensed; a few are effectively absent. The Morgan is what you might get if you asked Fiore to write a more compact version of his teaching, or what a scribe might produce when working with less time and less budget for illustration.

The illustrations that do exist in the Morgan are well-drawn and useful, but there are simply fewer of them. Some plays that the Getty depicts in multiple images appear in the Morgan as a single image with condensed text.

Why the Morgan Still Matters

Given that the Getty is more complete, why should modern practitioners care about the Morgan? Several reasons.

Textual variations. Where the Getty's text and the Morgan's text describe the same play differently, those differences give us information. Sometimes they resolve an ambiguity in one version. Sometimes they suggest the two copies drew from slightly different source notes. Comparing the two is a classical textual-criticism exercise that genuinely improves interpretation.

Different illustration choices. When both manuscripts show the same play but choose different moments to illustrate, you learn things you cannot learn from one alone. The Morgan's scribe thought a different moment was the diagnostic one, and knowing that helps reconstruct what the play actually looks like in motion.

Redundancy against loss. We are lucky that Fiore's work survives in multiple copies, because single manuscripts can be damaged, lost, or destroyed. The Morgan is insurance against the Getty being unavailable for any reason, and vice versa. Historical manuscripts have been lost to fires, wars, and simple neglect; two copies is better than one.

Authentication. When both manuscripts agree on a specific detail, we have higher confidence that the detail reflects Fiore's original teaching rather than a scribal error. When they disagree, we can investigate the disagreement and decide which version looks more authentic.

The Style of the Morgan

Reading the Morgan alongside the Getty, you notice that the two feel slightly different on the page.

The Morgan's Italian is the same basic vernacular as the Getty's but with minor scribal quirks: different spellings, slight variations in word choice, occasional omissions. The hand writing the text is clearly professional but slightly less uniform than the Getty's scribe. The illustrations are less coloured; many are line drawings without the Getty's full illumination.

This is consistent with the Morgan being a working or intermediate-quality presentation copy, rather than the showpiece volume the Getty appears to be. The Getty was almost certainly made for a specific noble patron willing to pay for gold leaf and elaborate pigments. The Morgan was made for someone who wanted a good copy of Fiore's teaching but did not need it to be a display-grade object.

Both are valuable. They are just aimed at slightly different audiences.

Why Modern Practitioners Work Primarily from the Getty

For the working HEMA practitioner today, the Getty is the default reference for a few simple reasons.

Completeness. More plays, more illustrations, more text. You learn more from an hour with the Getty than from an hour with the Morgan.

Image quality. The Getty's illustrations are clearer, better preserved, and more useful for identifying exactly what the figures are doing.

Digital access. The Getty Museum has made high-resolution scans of MS Ludwig XV 13 freely available online. The Morgan has made its manuscript available too (images of MS M.383 are accessible via the Morgan's digital facsimile program), but the Getty's scans are what most practitioners started with and continue to use.

Community momentum. Twenty years of HEMA scholarship has centred on the Getty. Translations, interpretations, training videos, and club materials all refer to the Getty page numbers and images. This builds a kind of shared vocabulary that the Morgan has not developed in the same way.

Serious scholars, though, always read both. When an interpretation hinges on a specific detail, they check the Morgan to see if it agrees. When the Getty is ambiguous, they look at the Morgan to see if it clarifies. This is standard textual-criticism practice, and HEMA's leading interpreters (Tom Leoni, Guy Windsor, Michael Chidester, and others) treat it as the baseline.

The Pisani Dossi and the Paris

For completeness: the two other surviving Fiore manuscripts are worth knowing about, even if they are even less commonly studied than the Morgan.

The Pisani Dossi MS is in verse rather than prose, making it a stylistically different read. The text is compressed into rhyming couplets, which must have been a mnemonic device for students memorising the material. Illustrations are present but less detailed than the Getty's. Held in private hands in Italy.

MS Latin 11269 (the Paris) is the Latin-language version. Fiore (or his patron) evidently prepared a version for a scholarly or clerical audience who would have preferred Latin to Italian. The content broadly overlaps with the other manuscripts but uses different vocabulary and some different illustrations. Held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Together with the Getty and Morgan, these four surviving copies are everything we have of Fiore's written work. Four versions, produced by different scribes for different audiences, across what must have been two or three decades. The fact that any of them survived at all is a small miracle of medieval bookmaking.

What the Multiple Copies Tell Us About Fiore

One subtle but important thing. The existence of four surviving presentation copies of Fior di Battaglia tells us that Fiore's work was valued enough to copy repeatedly in the decades after he wrote it. Nobody copies a manuscript unless someone is willing to pay for the scribe's labour and the vellum and the illuminator's time.

So Fiore's contemporaries, and the generation after him, thought this book was worth preserving. They commissioned copies. They stored them in noble libraries. They treated them as valuable objects.

Six hundred years later, that early valuation is the reason we have anything at all. The Getty, the Morgan, the Pisani Dossi, and the Paris all survive because someone in the early 1400s thought Fior di Battaglia was important enough to copy well. Fiore's own sense of his work's value turned out to be widely shared.

Come and Study the Art the Manuscripts Preserved

We train from Fiore's teaching every Tuesday evening at HEMA Penzance, 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. The Morgan Library's digital facsimile program also makes MS M.383 available online for scholarly comparison.