Working out in the Middle Ages
Playing with swords
If you want to learn how to dance, you need a dance instructor. If you want to play football, it’s a good idea to join a football club. Wrestling, swimming, karate; these are all activities you actually have to do if you want to learn how to.
So why then did the late fifteenth century and the sixteenth century see the publication of so many ‘fighting books’? These were manuals that explained to the reader how sword-fighting techniques and, to a lesser degree, knife-fighting and wrestling techniques work.
‘I have a lot of athletic experience myself’, says historian Miente Pietersma, who’s doing his PhD research on these books. ‘I’m a sports instructor myself. As such, I know that if I give ten people the same instructions, they’ll execute it ten different ways. They’ll interpret it differently; one person might be more flexible, or they’ll have a different awareness of how their body works.’
Technically complex
Pietersma isn’t your average sports instructor. In addition to being a researcher at the UG, he teaches historical European martial arts (HEMA). In other words: sword fighting. He discovered the sport as a history student ten years ago and became addicted. Sword fighting is a little more than just tapping some practice weapons against each other, as they often do in films. ‘It’s an intense sport with a lot of movement’, he says, ‘and technically pretty complex. It’s kind of like a cross between chess and ice hockey.’
It’s not that easy to translate what’s on the page into practice
Pietersma fights at Groningen sword-fighting school Mars, and it was there that he found many of the ‘fighting books’ that were used a lot in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in South Germany and North Italy. These books formed the basis for the ‘rediscovery’ of sword fighting as a sport in the nineties and practitioners of the sport study them fanatically. ‘There are entire databases where people uploaded amateur transcripts of the texts. I can’t think of a single hobby where people have so much fun deciphering fifteenth-century German than this one. It’s genuinely very interesting.’
However, although these books are valuable as instruction manuals, it’s also clear that most of the knowledge must have been transferred verbally and through practice, says Pietersma. ‘I’ll occasionally give my students a wooden practice sword and a transcription and tell them to figure it out. It’s a good way to show them that it’s not that easy to translate what’s on the page into practice.’
Reminder
The point is, he says, that these texts were never meant to be the only source of sword-fighting knowledge. ‘People had an entirely different attitude towards the written word in the late Middle Ages. Today, we tend to see them as the culmination of practical knowledge. As something lofty. But back then, they were meant more as reminders, or guides that instructors could use to base their own teaching methods on.’
They also don’t appear to be intended as a way to train soldiers or other professional swashbucklers. The number of fighting books is too large for that. Hundreds of them were printed and disseminated among the urban middle class in South Germany and North Italy. And although those people were often part of the local city watch, they were also just bakers, butchers, and carpenters. Not soldiers.
Then there’s the type of weapons mentioned in the instructions. ‘Some of them explain how to use a double-handed longsword’, says Pietersma. ‘They were very popular in the sixteenth century, but they had become completely obsolete in the military by that time.’
Recreation
So what were these books even used for? Sports! ‘People were simply doing it as something fun’, he says. ‘Although the word “sports”, with its modern emphasis on rules and tracking performance, didn’t exist at the time. What they did have was ludo, or “game” in Latin.’
It turns out there was a lively culture of recreation in South Germany and North Italy. Martial arts clubs were an important part of that, says Pietersma. While ball games like the predecessors to football or handball were the most popular type of sports, there were countless clubs that taught sword fighting. These clubs also regularly organised competitions. ‘I found one that had apparently been purchased by the club as a whole. The flyleaf has a list of its members and the following message: “We are all brothers and we love fighting and drinking.”’
A duel in the market square attracted thousands of spectators
Some clubs were even supported by the city administration. ‘Probably because they thought it had some military relevance. It would also prevent people from acting out in other ways. Kind of like how, today, we create football fields for youths to use.’
And while most competitions wouldn’t have been very large, they did sometimes garner a lot of attention. ‘I know one case from Milan, where a Spanish sword-fighting master would travel to all the fighting schools to prove himself. He would challenge the local master to a duel at the market square, and this would attract thousands of spectators.’
The local magistrate had to get the police to keep the piece, after which everyone pointed the finger at the Spaniard, Pietersma read in the references he found. So what happened next? Pietersma shrugs. He hasn’t been able to find out. ‘That’s kind of the problem with mediaeval sources.’
Fun
But perhaps the most interesting and striking thing he discovered is how important people from the Middle Ages thought it was to have fun when they were learning to fight. ‘People tend to think that fighting is very serious and only for self defence. Having fun is not a priority.’
If people only work out because they have to, they’ll never keep it up
The idea that the Middle Ages was this dark period where people’s main motto was memento mori, remember you must die, is incorrect, he says. ‘It’s a stereotype that people in the Renaissance liked to apply to the Middle Ages. But if you look at other mediaeval texts, such as church sermons, they constantly emphasise how important it is to have fun in life. Because if you’re not having fun or being relaxed, your spirit will start to distract itself with sinful thoughts.’
So during sword fighting, which was ludo, a game, fun was held to be crucial to the learning process, Pietersma found out. ‘It’s very clear that they believed that fun was essential in transferring knowledge that was learned through experience, like sword fighting. It’s necessary to have that interaction between body and spirit.’
He thinks it’s an important lesson. ‘We can still learn from that today.’ He sees it happen a lot at his sword-fighting school in Groningen. People who have absolutely no experience come in because they think sword fighting might be ‘fun’. ‘These people sometimes go through a total transformation. Not because they have to, but because they’re having so much fun.’
These days, we tend to put theoretical knowledge on a pedestal, he says, and we reduce our moving bodies to numbers. ‘Everyone has a pedometer and we have to move a minimum number of minutes a day or our spine collapses. But we’re more than just moving spines, we’re moving people. I think they realised the importance of that much better in the Middle Ages. If people only work out because they have to, they’ll never keep it up.’