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!

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!)

Followup from the last post, then knives.

 So I guess it's every three months for a blog post these days? Oof. It might be better than nothing but I'm gonna try to be better about that.

Anyway! So on the docket list, we have:

• The remaining Book Two rules for the sword alone.
• Thoughts on the rules we've already looked at; similarities, differences, etc.
• Flashcard thoughts
• Something new! (Spoiler: knives.)

I'm not going to get to all of these today because well, everything, but I'll get to some of it!

The flashcards idea worked out pretty well. It's forcing me to learn individual guard positions on their own, rather than as part of a specific sequence. It also is cracking my brain open and making it have to get better at quickly picking up small bits of choreography, which is certainly going to be useful for exercises like play building. (Also it'll be useful to keep that muscle exercised for picking up more kung fu forms.) 

The thought process of "why would I move from here to here" is also something that's pretty great. I think that so far I've been able to come up with mostly-reasonable answers for every change. Some of them have been stretches, and some of my initial responses have been along the lines of "I can see this, and it mostly makes sense, but this would probably be a better response to what I'm imagining" but it's an interesting exercise to try and figure out situations where it would make the most sense to roll through the positions that the flash cards give me. Overall, excellent idea so far. It has especially been good lately when it's just really hard to try and figure out what I want to practice when I grab my sword. It's important to practice with intent, and not just do something like "pick up sword, do some lunges." (I mean, doing lunges for practice is good! Just do it deliberately and with mindfulness and not just on autopilot.) Even if I just shrug and default to grabbing the flash cards, the format of the practice itself forces me to have to engage my brain if it's going to work at all, which is honestly really great these days.

Despite having Things To Do already, as is my way, I'm going to add to the stack. Gotta have a good variety of things to choose from when I have the time to write in here, yeah? So here we go - knives. I want to go through the knife plays of Fiore and Marozzo and compare them to each other for any similarities and differences. It should be fun on a number of levels!

Looking at Fiore, we can see that he wrote Flower of Battle at the beginning of the 1400s. The type of dagger we see is a rondel, which is essentially an icepick. I've seen some versions of them which have a kind of edge, but they're really made for punching through the small gaps in armor. To that point, the techniques we see in Fiore's manual are intended for use on people whether or not they're wearing armor - though frankly, if it works on someone in armor then as a general rule it'll work just fine on someone out of armor.

Moving to Marozzo, his Opera Nova was written in 1536 or so. The dagger we see illustrated looks to be a more "generic" kind of bladed and double-edged dagger with a crossguard. All the plates illustrate an unarmored civilian use of arms as well. Granted, in Fiore's time we'd see duels with plate and harness and in Marozzo's time that wasn't really the common thing to do (at least according to my understanding) but there could be a little more to it as well. The stepping patterns that Fiore describes are particularly suited to a battlefield with uncertain footing and a need to change facing, and we don't see that same type of thing described in Marozzo. Barring the dagger defenses, which include unarmed defenses against a knife attack, it seems that Marozzo is really looking at civilian dueling and defense. Of course, the fact that he has an extensive treatise on duels and dueling in his book also points towards that.

The manuals differ in a couple more ways, too. Fiore's is a sparser writing style, rather than the extensive and step-by-step descriptions that Marozzo offers. The structures of each them are also really distinct. Fiore has his (as far as I know, unique to him) master -> remedy master -> scholar -> counter 'choose your own adventure' system for laying out the various attacks and defenses. Marozzo has a more common setup with individual plays that he works through. Given these differences, I suspect the easiest way to begin comparing sequences between the two of them is to begin with a play from Marozzo and seeing if Fiore offers a similar opening situation, and seeing if Marozzo's solutions are available in Fiore's selection of possible responses.

I'm really excited about this!