Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

the Roman world. The Romans added no innovations to Greek wrestling;
they used the techniques that had been developed over the previous centuries
and adapted them to their own temporal and religious festivals. The
Romans themselves much preferred the blood sports of the empire, such as
fights between gladiators or animals. As a result, wrestling suffered a loss
of prestige. When Christianity became the official religion of the empire in
the fourth century A.D., and later when the empire fell and chaos ensued,
organized sports and high-level athletic techniques such as wrestling declined
as well. Although wrestling continued to be practiced, most notably
for combat training, in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) until the
empire’s demise in A.D. 1453, the authority of the Eastern Orthodox
Church prevented wrestling from obtaining status as a sport. The Greek
love of wrestling, with its innovations and techniques, had come to an end.
Contemporaries of the Romans, however, maintained wrestling systems.
The Celts were notable in this regard. Roman writings (e.g., Caesar’s
Commentaries on the Gallic War) describe Celtic life, including armed and
unarmed combat, and note that Celtic festivals included wrestling. At least
two variants of these forms of wrestling still exist: Cornish wrestling, practiced
in the British area of Cornwall, and Breton wrestling, practiced in the
French area of Brittany. Not surprisingly, these are also two of the last remaining
outposts of Celtic life on the European continent, with Cornish, a
Celtic language, still being spoken into the twentieth century, and Breton,
also a Celtic language, still spoken in Brittany in the twenty-first century.
Various wrestling systems, both combative and sporting, appeared in
the city-states and nations that arose in Europe following the fall of the Roman
Empire. For example, in the area of what is today Germany, Austria,
and the Czech Republic, as early as the thirteenth century there are indications
that knights and men-at-arms used wrestling techniques in hand-tohand
combat. Later, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, German fighting
guilds systematically taught wrestling techniques, known as Ringen, and
disarming techniques, collectively known in German as Ringen am Schwert
(wrestling at the sword), as part of their curricula. The Fechtbuch (fighting
book) of Hans Talhoffer offers several pages of illustrations on what today
would be classified as “getting inside the opponent,” when an unarmed
grappler moves within the effective fighting range of a sword or other
weapon and removes it from the armed combatant. Several other Fechtbuchs
from this and later time periods clearly show methods of throwing,
takedowns, and armlocks that indicate that wrestling as a combat art was
in use in Europe in the Middle Ages. One exponent of wrestling, Ott the
Jew, was apparently so respected in his native Austria that he was even able
to transcend the boundaries of anti-Semitism that existed in European societies
during this period.
Wrestling and Grappling: Europe 715