Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

an influential treatise at the time, which retains its popularity. Saviolo was
instrumental in bringing the art to England when he settled in London to
teach his method. A fellow Italian master, Giacomo Di Grassi, had another
major rapier manual, translated into English, under the title His True Arte
of Defence, in 1594. Also, Salvator Fabris was a master from Bologna who
in the late 1500s traveled in Germany, France, and Spain and synthesized the
best of many other teachers. Their methods reflect important changes in the
blades, techniques, and attitudes of Western Masters of Defence. Because
firearms had rendered the traditional individual weapons of war less relevant
on the battlefield, the focus of masters was now less on weapons of war and
unarmed skills than on personal civilian dueling. Masters now became far
less concerned with running schools for common warrior skills than with
teaching the upper classes the newly popular art of defense. Of these later
masters, Ridolfo Capo Ferro, author of Gran Simulacro (Great Representation/Description)
of 1610, is considered the undisputed Italian grand master
of the rapier and the father of modern fencing. He taught a linear style of
fence and emphasized the superiority of the thrust over the cut in order to
utilize the rapier’s advantage of quick, deceptive reach.
Other notable Renaissance masters and their works include Vigianni’s
Lo Schermo (The Shield) of 1575, the Milanese master Lovino’s Traite d’Escrime
(Fencing Treatise) of 1580, Jacob Sutor’s 1612 Neues Kunstliches
Fechtbuch (New Artistic Fencing Book), and Nicoletto Giganti’s 1606
Scola overo Teatro (School or Theater). There was also Sir William Hope,
a military veteran who taught and between 1691 and 1714 wrote numerous
books, including The Scots Fencing-Master (1687) and The Complete
Fencing-Master (1692). Other contemporary works treat the use of the
slender thrusting small-sword, sabers, cutlasses, spadroons, and assorted
cavalry blades.
Germany produced important Renaissance masters, also. Paulus Mair,
an official from the city of Augsburg, compiled three large manuals covering
a great variety of swords and weaponry. Fechtmeister Joachim Meyer
wrote his own teachings down in 1570, as did Jacob Sutor, who described
his methods in 1612. In general, the Germans resisted adopting the rapier
in favor of their traditional weaponry.
The English fighting guilds, like the German ones, resisted for some
time the encroaching civilian system of the Hispano-Italian rapier in favor
of their traditional militarily focused methods. During the 1500s, The Corporation
of Maisters of the Noble Science of Defence, or the “London Company
of Maisters,” was an organized guild offering instruction in the traditional
English forms of self-defense. Training was offered in the use of
swords, staffs, pole-arms, and other weapons. It also included wrestling,
pugilism, and grappling and disarming techniques. In keeping with the Re-
Masters of Defence 323