Hi all, this would be my first post here, and firstly I must apologize for the faults in my english, since this is not my primary language.
I also apologize for what it seems to me as a stupid question, but my burnt out brain can´t find an answer! :-)

It has come to my attention so many plates in this great book (Flos Duellatorum), depicting the fighters handling the blade section of their swords for further control/handling. Even a couple of plates show a fighter grabbing his opponent's blade.
Was this practice done bare handed? Were some kind of leather gloves (Or any other material) normally used to achieve this?

On the other hand, if no protection was used whatsoever, should I imagine that these swords, designed for the cut and thrust, were not as sharp as I firstly imagined?
I have a spadona-like replica myself, which I use for practice and can be perfectly handled as depicted in the book... but I consider it to have no sharpness at all. It surely can´t cut paper cleanly, nor the skin on my hands (At least during handling).

Thank you very much for any feedback!

probably leather gloves, unfortunately no plate i have seen shows gloves.
my group had a test cutting accident with a cut hand from the A&A german bastard sword. our study group leader was teaching a friend of his how to cut and the guy grabbed the blade without thinking and put a cut into his palm and fingers. very little pressure was applied with a bare hand but it still cut.

I don't have a suitable sharp to confirm with, but I have heard that you can hold the blade without gloves, even an especially sharp blade, as long as you hold it by putting pressure on the flat of the blade.

Thanks for the replies! Honestly, before asking this question, I thought the answer was going to be either one of these:

A) Don't mind the plate drawings! Those guys always wore some kind of hard leather gloves (or some kind of gauntlet) which allowed them to accomplish the crazy task of grasping their opponent's blades.
And yes, those type of swords ("Spadonas", or great war swords optimized for the thrust) usually had nasty-sharpened edges.

B) No, those kind of swords were not much sharpened as to easily cut skin upon contact, because their lethality relied more upon their acute point than their blade cutting capability, so they could be handled without much danger of receiving a nasty cut.

I didn't imagine that some answers would contemplate the fact of the swords indeed being sharp, and a fighter trying to actually grasp the blade with an unprotected hand! (Though leather glove or no leather glove, a sharpened blade may inflict serious damage anyway)
I would consider this a dangerous move in the already dangerous business of fencing! At least, I would admire someone with enough cold blood as to successfully perform this kind of movement without being hurt.

Oh, just went back to the original post and I just noticed that I misread it: I jumped to the conclusion that you were talking about halfswording were you grab hold of your own sharp blade with your off hand to better control the point when trying to find gaps in an opponents' armour.

The way one holds a sharp blade should be similar in both cases I think ? Just make sure you re-read my earlier post keeping in mind what I had in mind and see if it still makes sense to you.

These things happen when one reads what one expects as opposed to what is actually written. :blush: :lol:

As a Fiorist myself, I think I can add somethign to this discussion. We are essentially talking about 2 places in the manuscript where the grabbing of the blade happens:

1. In employing "half-swording" where you have one hand on the hilt and the other on the blade in the middle
2. In grabbing your opponent's debole (end of the blade) to control his weapon


First of all, when "half-swording" in the unarmored section, Fiore specifically says that these techniques are "better done in armor than without" which means that when you have an armored gauntlet on, it's no problem to grab the sword blade. Second of all, I strongly suspect that the swords were generally not sharp all the way down, as modern ones are sometimes made. Vadi says that the sword should be sharpened three or four fingers from the tip, which means it doesn't need to be super sharp in the middle of the blade, where contact with the other sword might take place. So I think we have a distorted view of how sharp a sword needs to be. I have done some thrusting from the half-sword with my Albion Mercenary and Atrim 1506, both very sharp all the way down, and I did get some minor cuts on my hand, not really enough to disable me but it did hurt a little.

As far as grabbing your opponen't blade, well if you have controlled it to a stop it's really not that hard to do, and you don't risk serious damage to the hand as long as you don't try and fight him for it. If you have bare hands and you're afraid of getting cut, you can even push the sword laterally off of yours, it won't be as assured of a hit as when you grab it, but it will give you a tempo to hit the other guy, and that's what this play is all about. I wouldn't hesitate to grab any weapon by the blade if it meant taking down the other guy and saving my life.

Also, I think we have to remember that Fiore's accounts of unarmoured duels with other masters consist of him wearing "nothing but a doublet and gloves of chamois" and that specific mentality of what is unarmoured may permeate his use of sword disarms & "half-swording" (which he shows in the unarmoured sword in two hands and sword in one hand).

However, something to keep in mind is if you can immobilize the blade of the other person, then grasping it is much simpler. Also, I find that the grasp is there to keep you from being slashed while you do unto them, so the impetus to grasp it despite some slight superficial cuts on the hand is pretty high. Now, in the half-sword, you're 95% of the time wearing gauntlets, so it's a bit of a moot point. There are plenty of better tactics to use in unarmoured combat, so the half-sword is both rarely shown and rarely used when unarmoured.

And, as Nicholas points out, there may be some degree of variance in the sharpening of the swords and there quite likely would be different swords and or blade profiles used for unarmoured versus armoured combat (Fiore and Vadi both show a bizarre armoured combat sword with an unsharpened area for grasping in the halfsword...can't remember if a similar weapon is shown in any of the German treatises...)

Keith

As with so many things, there are multiple factors one has to consider.

One of the often neglected aspects of grasping a blade is this: Not all swords are the same. A slender, thrust oriented blade such as the Oakeshott Type XVII is going to lend itself to half-sword techniques much more easily than a broad cutting blade with a thin cross section such as an Oakeshott Type XIII.

There's evidence that gloves were worn, but there's plenty of evidence that people fenced barehanded as well (such as in illustrations of many period manuscripts). Some of the points above have already been addressed, but let me recap some for simplicity (and add some of my own) in addition to the issue of blade type:

1. Pressure is primarily applied to the flats, not the edges of the sword
2. The hand is stationary, and not sliding around on the blade
3. In grabbing an opponent's sword, the sword cannot be in motion when attempting to grasp it
4. Let's face it, medieval hands are not the same as modern hands. As much training as I do with swords on a daily basis, my hands still probably spend more time on a keyboard than they do on a hilt. Not to mention I've lived a very easy life compared to my ancestors. My hands don't have the same kind of calluses that Fiore most likely had.

I' sure that time had exacted its toll on the blades I examined, when I had the occasion of handling real ancient weapons in a private collection I found that blades could be touched with a bare hand without any risk of a cut.

And, if you're willing to consider not-quite-period solutions, heavy leather gloves with mail over them pretty much eliminate the risk of cuts.