Marozzo's Second Presa and Fiore

So a year and change ago, I took a look at Marozzo's first knife defense and compared it to the material in Fiore. After the last series of posts I wanted to get back to something I hadn't poked at in a while and also something that would be contained to a single post - so let's look at Marozzo's second defense against getting jumped by a guy with a knife!

Here we have a response to someone coming at you with an underhanded attack with a dagger. Marozzo wants you to block down hard with your left hand, grabbing his wrist or forearm. While you're making the grab, step in with your right foot to their outside. To perform the throw from there, grab their right thigh and pull up while you shove under their arm with your shoulder, putting them into the ground. (One of the sword and buckler plays describes a very similar presa but notes that you can "carry him away" if you want, so lifting them up into a fireman's carry is a very period option as well, it looks like!)

My first thought upon working through this in my head was that unlike the first presa, there wouldn't be clear depiction of this defense in Fiore. As best I can tell, I'm not mistaken here. Of the nine dagger masters in Fiore, only the eighth and ninth discuss dealing with this kind of underhand dagger attack, and there are no plays from either of them which resemble this takedown at all. 

Very similar takedowns do appear elsewhere in earlier wrestling texts though - on page 51 in Jessica Finley's Medieval Wresting, which is a working guide to Ott Jud's German wrestling treatise from the mid-1400s, this is termed the "slipping through" and Finley states, "This throw is shown in many manuscripts including the Kal (In Service to the Duke, Tobler, page 182), Talhoffer (Medieval Combat, Rector, plate 196), and Auerswald's "Running through Under the Arm", plate 10." Germany had a very rich tradition of unarmored wrestling both for sport and earnest defense, so honestly if it was going to show up anywhere else, I'm not surprised it showed up here. 

I have a couple thoughts about why a similar style of takedown doesn't show up in Fiore though, and they all center around one thing - Fiore has an assumption of armor. It isn't that everything is illustrated with armor (it isn't), but the techniques as best I can tell are based around the worst-case assumption in terms of dealing with the additional weight, bulk, or restriction of armor.

In this case, getting under the arm as shown in Marozzo is a tight fit in many cases. I certainly wouldn't want to trust my ability to get my helmeted head and armored body into there if I'm wearing a full harness. I might also be worried about if I'd get hung up on my opponent's armor in this case as well. It's a good takedown - and Fiore loves him some takedowns - but I'm really not sure I see it being a great idea here.

Also, I'm not all that sure that it's reasonable to assume that someone in full harness can themselves pick up their similarly armored opponent and be balanced and in good control. Unless, I suppose, they're Hulk von Hogan - well known practitioner of Fiore! (I'm a very serious scholar who takes himself very seriously. Clearly.)

With that, I'm going to wrap this post. I think I'll do the next presa pretty soon though - I'm hoping to find more lines to draw between them and Fiore's plays before I'm done, and I want to get to a presa that has a solid similarity to dig into!