25 years of Secret Sword History! (Actually, make that 30…)

Just when you thought there couldn’t be anything less interesting than endless Star Wars regressions, here comes The SHotS Origin Story...

The Hidden Fabri—The State Church: Gottfried Kreussler

Part 4: Miles Christianus

Now Lost: Does this image, once in the library of the University of Jena, show the true founder of Kreusslerian thrust fencing?

The Dirty Half-Dozen

How a Livonian at Marburg took on six opponents at the same time until the rector broke up the fight…

Eberhard Werner Happel’s 1690 novel, Der Academische Roman, recounts the adventures of a group of stock characters representing the predominant tempers of contemporary students. There is the perma-horny lover boy, the drunkard, the pedantic leearned man of great ambition and meager purse. Obviously, the most likable one for our purposes is Klingenfeld, the swordsman of the group. A veteran of 58 scraps just at the four German universities he attended, not to mention several encounters during their journey, he also is a fountain of battle stories…

“The entire fencing school”—Johann Wolfgang Bieglein’s scholars in 1746

Reading through a cloying poem rewards us with a full list of Kreusslerian Scholars on the occasion of Bieglein’s wedding.

The Hidden Fabri—The State Church

The Kreussler Clan: Part 2…  Trinity

Having given Professor Göttling the heave-ho, what’s left of the Kreussler origin story? We straighten out the family tree… and ponder the reasons for speedy privilege.

The Hidden Fabri—The State Church: The Kreussler Clan

Part 1: Why we know more about Wilhelm Kreussler’s sex life than about his fencing method…

How a Jena philologist accidentally invented the Kreussler origin story.

The Hidden Fabri: The Acolyte—Christian Böhm

A dissertation on the finer points of the Fabri transmission.

Hidden in a 1672 thesis from Wittenberg: Some up-to-now unknown bits of information that increase our understanding of how and why the Fabri method managed to hang on and prosper in Germany for more than three centuries…

The Hidden Fabris: The Disciple — Heinrich von und zum Velde

• What if Old Wilhelm Kreussler was not the Kreussler to establish the Kreusslerian school of thrust fencing?
• Who was the “Dänische Edelmann” who taught Fabri’s system?
• Zum Velde a member of not one but two Germanicas?
• A little known dissertation providing tantalizing nuggets of information...
• And many more red herrings and rabbit holes of historical exploration…

Hynitzsch’s choice to immortalize zum Velde was the engraver Christian Romstet (born at Weimar in 1640, died in Leipzig on Nov. 21, 1721). Romstet’s claim to fame was creating copper plates depicting the portraits of the Leipzig clergy, some drawn based on oil paintings, others based on life (ad vivum).He is responsible for creating the only known portrait of zum Velde, which has been dated to 1667. Since zum Velde died April 16,1662, the engraving must be based on a now-lost oil portrait of the Kanonikus.

The German Connection II: “Balefuls of doubloons” and the Sienese Germanica

This is a sidelight on the Natio Germanica in Siena, before and around the time Capo Ferro was active as a fencing master at the local university. Other than a brief scene provided in Esch, this article is mostly background as to the presence and influence of German students. Unlike Fabri and the Germanica in Padua, we have not been able to locate specific vectors who may have continued or expanded Capo Ferro’s method abroad.

by J. Christoph Amberger

In Capo Ferro’s Siena, the members of the Natio Germanica were known colloquially as forestieri—meaning “strangers” or “foreigners”—and consisted of High and Low Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, Poles, Carinthians, Styrians, and Lombards from every corner and recess of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They occupied the Casa della Sapienza, a former paupers’ hospital that had been converted into a dormitory for foreign students in 1415. The Casa also had living space, lecture and disputation rooms for 30 Sapieanzani who stayedfor a term of up to seven years. 

The German Connection, Part I:

Salvatore Fabris and the Ultramontani

by J. Christoph Amberger

• Was Ridolfo Capo Ferro actually Rudolf Eisenhaupt, German Fechtmeister?
• Who were the ultramontani and what was their connection to Fabri?
• Why did a physician who argued astronomy with Kepler break a sword fighting a Paduan city soldier?
• How on earth did a prosperous Tuscan fencing master end up in Denmark?

More questions than you can shake a stick at… and we answer them all!

Armed with a sword, “according to local custom”: A Paduan student, a few decades before the events of this article…