Kilij or other curved sword Techniques
Hi,
I'm searching for fighting techniques regarding the Kilij or Shamshir. Has anyone ever came accros such techniques? Or knows of their existence? Maybe from the Ottoman period? Or other offcourse.

Kind regards,

Sander.
There is a Persian manual in the process of translation(?), and I think there's also a Mamluk furusiyya manual with a translated version already available from a specialty publisher. The Munyatu'l Ghuzat, maybe. But I don't know how much information it has on sworsdmanship, if indeed it had any at all.
While I haven't read them, I don't think the Mamluk material has much on strongly curved swords: I think they mostly appear in the 14th and 15th centuries and later.

Manouchehr Khorasani is leading a project to analyze and publish Iranian Fechtbooks. Most of his work is in German and Spanish so this may not help you. We have a lot of Western European sources on fighting with strongly curved swords from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Yes, you're right--the Mamluk manuals probably have little (if any) specifically on handling deeply-curved swords. It might be worthwhile to study the basic principles that possibly applied equally to straight and curved swords alike and thus might have survived even after the Turkic fashion of curved swords swept through the area in the 15th or 16th century or so. Otherwise, we might just well be stuck with nothing since we seem to have even fewer Turkish military training manuals than Mamluk ones.
Since the sabre was derived from the Kalij and the Shamshir I would suggest that fighting techniques used for sabres be looked into since I would think that they are basically the same or least very similar,The curved blade was found to be an excellent cut and thrust weapon which is why cavalry units adopted it for their troops. It came from the Mongols via the Persians to the Turks and Mamluks and up through the Balkans into Austria and Hungry and thence into western Europe. Used from horseback it delivers a sweeping cut while still being able to use its point for a thrust.

I have a Shamshir and found that it can cut very tough tatami omote much better than a straight edged medieval sword at least for me and with less effort. the Kalij with the wider blade near the point provides the weight necessary to cut thru mail in opinion. Austria used this feature in some of its sabres.

See if you can get a copy of CUT AND THRUST WEAPONS by Eduard Wagner published by Spring Books. I found mine thru the book section on this site.

Regards,

Harry
Thanks!
Thank you everybody for the information. I will look into CUT AND THRUST WEAPONS by Eduard Wagner. I'm familiar with the book(s) of Manouchehr Khorasani. Also planning on ordering his latest book when it comes out.

Further more, I can read and speak English and German so any fechtbücher in those languages will come in helpfull.

And last, another question, do you guys think that the Mamluk manuals on straight swords, or any other middle eastern manuals for that matter, differ much from the western? I can imagine many techniques to be the same, simply because they work! Does anyone have a idea or opinion about this?

Kind Regards,

Sander
Re: Thanks!
Sander Alsters wrote:
And last, another question, do you guys think that the Mamluk manuals on straight swords, or any other middle eastern manuals for that matter, differ much from the western? I can imagine many techniques to be the same, simply because they work! Does anyone have a idea or opinion about this?


You probably would have been able to handle something like, say, a Syrian or Egyptian straight sword with contemporary (12th-13th century) European techniques and vice versa. The problem is that we simply don't have any European sources from this period except for I.33 (which comes from the very end of the timeframe) while the Mamluk manuals don't seem to devote a lot of space to swordsmanship since their primary concern was with the primary weapons of the Muslim heavy horseman at the time, namely the bow and the lance, so any comparison would be quite difficult at best. Extrapolating the results to the use of curved swords would add another layer of dodginess.

To return to the original subject of the thread, the curved swords of early medieval Central Asia seemed to have been predominantly used in conjunction with a small buckler, especially in cavalry contexts. However, the more heavily-armoured sorts of cavalry could sometimes be seen (in illustrations) wielding their swords without a buckler, maybe because they thought their armour provided enough protection already or because the buckler wasn't so necessary when you were pursuing an enemy who had lost his will to resist (since some of the buckler-less illustrations are identifiable as pursuit scenes).

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