Marozzo's First Presa and Fiore

 Knife time! Let's dive in, and take a look at some Marozzo and Fiore!

First, we should consider a couple differences what the manuals are being written for. Marozzo's knife defenses appear to be straight-up civilian self defense. Fiore is generally more battlefield oriented, but the fact that he has dagger defenses which start from a seated position, which I think are much closer to the realm of "you're getting jumped" rather than "you're sitting down on the battlefield."

With the caveat that I'm not a teacher of practical self-defense, I think that this is reflected in the structure and details of the various plays. Marozzo presents a number of very specific sets of actions from a general "overhand" or "underhand" attack with a knife. Each of these plays is self-contained and fairly straightforward. These are things that could be fairly readily drilled and practiced in each discrete play, so they'd be easier to gain a baseline proficiency in - but they aren't designed out of the gate to teach how to flow from one to another, or how to deal with possible responses from your attacker.

Fiore is working from the perspective of a martial system for a trained soldier, and that's reflected in the complexity of the plays; the original attack, the remedy, the counter, the counter-counter, and so on. Heck, you could shift from one flowchart into another and into another in the correct situation. There's a lot more there to work with, but it's also more complicated at the outset.

So that's my initial take. Am I right? Beats me, let's start and maybe by the end of all of this I'll have more of a clue!

Marozzo's First Presa is a really straightforward takedown. Against an overhand attack, we block the descending arm with our left hand. We grab their arm and move it backward while we step in and place our right leg behind their right leg and put our right arm across their neck. (The illustration looks like we're grabbing their neck or shoulder, which I think gives more control than just getting your arm across them, but in a pinch that would work too.) We "twist [our] left hand toward [their] right side" and "turn our arms downwards towards the ground." The goal according to Marozzo is to send them head-first into the ground.

Okay, so. One of the first things we notice is something that we definitely have in common with Fiore, and for that matter with all the knife classes I've ever taken. Specifically, we're moving into our opponent. There's no hanging back or playing distance games or anything like that - someone is pulling a knife and trying to icepick you with it, you block it and get in real close so you can get your hands on them and do bad things.

But are the mechanics of this play seen in Fiore? Yes! Specifically, we're looking at the seventh play of the first remedy master, which is the same kind of left handed block against a descending attack. In the illustration of the first remedy master, we can see the left hand and foot are both aligned forward here, which will let us step through with our right foot as Marozzo describes in his manual.

Moving onward to the seventh play, which Fiore describes as "having no counter," we can see a very similar sort of position that Marozzo has us stand in, before our opponent ends up on the ground, though there are some differences. Marozzo has our hand gripping our opponent, and we can still see a pretty decent amount of space between the two combatants. With Fiore, there looks to be much less space - the battle hug is in full evidence, with our attacker's neck in the crook of our elbow, rather than at the length of our arm. Marozzo's instruction to "turn our arms downward" doesn't quite work because of this, but instead we can see how Fiore wants our body to align itself, especially our hips. Look at the hip alignment in Marozzo's illustration as compared to Fiore's. 

It occurs to me now though, that if you follow Marozzo's instruction to pull your arms downward, twisting your hips can flow naturally from that. I wish he called that out, though. I might be adding my own interpretation to what he wants us to do, but all the instruction I've gotten in movements like this would absolutely call for using my hips and full body to take my partner down like this, not just my arms.

So, okay! It looks like a play that's similar enough that I'd be willing to call it the same thing is showing up in both Fiore and Marozzo, which is a neat place to start. Refreshingly straightforward, too! There are twenty or so more plays in Marozzo that we're going to work through, and by the end we should be able to see if there are any which don't map out to Fiore, which of Fiore's don't appear in Marozzo, and see if we can start to draw any other conclusions as we go!

(Images courtesy Wiktenaur, and if you don't already have this site bookmarked, go check them out!)