Triangulation in HEMA

I first came upon the term “triangulation” in HEMA sometime in the mid-'00s in an article on the Schola Gladiatoria site, and my initial reaction was, of course, “That's not how triangulation works, triangulation is using two points and two distances to locate a third point!” But the concept was one already familiar to me (and eventually I made peace with the name).

The plain fact is, even though we study sword arts, we don’t really fight with real swords (and ditto for students of other weapons—even, to a lesser extent, wrestling). The core scenario that Liechtenauer’s art was apparently designed around, the earnest fight with deadly weapons, is the one thing that we can never truly practice. To attempt to redress this uncomfortable fact, practitioners of historical European martial arts have long used a mixed approach to our training, combining diverse training methodologies that complement each other in an attempt to develop the ideal well-rounded fighter—one who, perhaps, even has the skills that would keep him alive in the unlikely event of that real fight.

Equally important to this consideration is the development of the core martial virtue of control. Control is not some magical trait that a martial artist automatically develops with experience; contrary to popular belief, the ability to correctly perform an action slow does not automatically impart the ability to do it quickly, and neither does the ability to do it quickly allow a fighter to slow it down. Rather, control is nothing more than choice, the ability to choose in any given moment where to strike, where stop that strike, and how much speed and force to apply. Since you can only fight the way you've trained to fight, if you only train in one way then you have no choice, and therefore no control. Developing control therefore requires mixing many different approaches and training in many different contexts, with different tools and different constraints, and striving to apply the specific lessons from each one across all of the others.

In my ill-spent youth as a scholar in ARMA we used a training methodology consisting of four parts: drilling and light sparring with wooden wasters for beginners, drilling and light sparring with blunt steel simulators for the more advanced, heavy sparring with padded “boffers”, and test cutting with sharps. Fortunately, we have much better tools now than we ever did then, and even more fortunately, we’ve come a long way in the past fifteen years in our understanding of swordsmanship (and of teaching swordsmanship).

Since this is a topic that has come up several times in the past few months in online discussions, I will lay out below what the current state of this triangulation is in the practice of Kunst des Fechtens, and the best practices embraced by a growing number of clubs in the xKdF Network. They revolve around three primary training tools: sharp swords, blunt sword simulators, and foils (or “Feders”).

Historical Triangulation

As you may have noticed in previous posts, I prefer to put history first even when discussing modern training practices. While the historical arts we study were often designed for killing, or at least for use in lethal encounters, it seems clear from historical records (and common sense) that not every martial artist in early Modern Europe actually applied them in this fashion. Accounts of period warfare don't generally include high enough death tolls to allow for even a sizable minority of soldiers involved to have killed an enemy, and based on period records, even the highest urban murder rates (including informal duels and street fights) are merely comparable to modern cities. So while the experience of killing an opponent with a sword was undoubtedly more common in Europe five hundred years ago than it is today, the question of how the average fencer mastered his art remains, and the obvious conclusion is that they were engaged in the same sort of triangulation as we are. This topic is vast and far-reaching and we cannot explore it adequately here, but I will briefly summarize what triangulation was like historically to give some perspective on our topic.

Based on artwork and sadly-scarce records, it seems likely that much training was conducted in light gear (street clothes, usually) with sharp swords, and sometimes also blunted swords or other sword simulators—the only surviving two-handed varieties are superficially similar to our modern foils/Feders, but a number of one-handed artifacts more similar to our blunt simulators also exist. There is no evidence of specialized fencing masks during the early Modern period, but records speak of wearing broad-brimmed hats to protect the head and face against downward blows, and padded gloves and other heavy clothing certainly existed and were used. These tools were used primarily for technique training and various types of drills and light play. (De Rei Militari, a famous treatise on Roman infantry tactics that mentions fencing against a pole driven into the ground, was quite popular in this period, but it's unknown whether anyone actually attempted to recreate this alleged training activity.)

In order to train aggression and striking with full force, they engaged in tournament play just as we do. Knightly tournaments (later adopted by the Burgher class as well) conducted in full armor with wooden swords or, later on, simpler cudgels are well-documented in the late Medieval and early Modern periods. These were generally fought with the objective of knocking an opponent to the ground or otherwise beating him into submission, turning into long contests that tested endurance as much as they did technique. Likewise, the Fechtschule tradition included wet bouts, or “fencing to the bloom”, in which the fencers were unarmored, the Feders were sharpened, and the goal was to open a bleeding wound on the head of one's opponent (or a higher bleeding wound, if both were struck in the same exchange).

Test cutting as we apply it today is not documented historically, but that is not to say that there was no cutting practice. The most war-like guilds of the Burgher class were those who worked with blades every day, such as the furriers (who were often named interchangeably with the Marxbruder guild), butchers, and tanners, and those who made and maintained such weapons, such as the cutlers (equally synonymous with the Veiterfechter), sword-polishers, and so on. But more importantly, the weapons of the hunt—spears, crossbows, and swords—were well aligned with the weapons of war in the early Modern period and the popular activity of hunting was a prime opportunity to learn cutting and thrusting against living creatures (and also become accustomed to taking life).

(A more direct analog to our test-cutting is the practice of cutting clay towers or pyramids, but while that has been documented among Arabic and Persian cultures in the early Modern period, we have not yet found direct evidence of it in Europe until much later, so we cannot yet say with certainty that it occurred.)

With this is mind, let us now turn to current practices in HEMA.

Triangulation Today