This is the first time I have been involved in a blog so excuse my poor blogging skills. This is a joint blog currently run by myself (Gib) and Naedyr from the SCA who have developed an interesting in honing our skills at competing in the SCA ruleset for heavy fighting. In particular the SCA household (Reverie) that we participate in has predominantly florentine (two-sword wielding) fighters. We are unashamedly unapologetically speaking from an SCA bent. With that said, some excellent online resources for SCA heavy fighting or Fechtbücher are (and have been for some time) available, most notably:
and more historically any of the Fechtbücher:
While these resources focus on diverse areas of fighting for sword and shield or two handed weapon combinations, very little has been said regarding florentine fighting. There are a few reasons why this may be so.
Florentine itself is a somewhat contentious issue with little historical evidence indicating that two swords were infact used at all in the context of battle or sport between 600 and 1600AD. To date we have not seen anything which challenges this statement and concede that Florentine in the SCA is more of a 'what about if' than a 'but that's what they did'. We, however, feel that Florentine adds a unique and fresh perspective to combat in the SCA under the assumed armor (mostly chainmail + helm) rules. We can postulate on a few reasons why that might be.
Florentine is not a weapons combination which is readily accessible to newbies. Very few people will state that fighting with two weapons is easier than one. The joy of a shield is that it allows the emphasis of your attacks to come from your preferred hand. With this in mind viable shot selection comes down to a range of movement options described in detail by Duke Gaston 's Res Ducis and a range of target locations from the legs, body, shoulders, arms and head. Adding another sword effectively doubles the possibilities for selecting an attack. This means that in training one needs to do all the training of a single sword user and then do it all over again for the other hand. So far we have found little reason why someone would be incapable of learning to use both hands to attack early on, however our experience has been that the requirements of a great deal of training time (including the adaptation or generation of a number of drills) to simply feel comfortable fighting from either hand equally is prohibitive. It is certainly a valid argument that if this time had been spent on sword and board fighting, we may have progressed further.. I guess we will never know for sure :).
There are a number of reasons why florentine has not historically been an option. We can only base our knowledge of medieval armor exploits from fechtbuch, museum exhibits, internet images and the host of experimental displays on youtube such as this or this, it seems apparent that the arms (and hands) may be the biggest vulnerability under assumed SCA armor. Therefore we think that while the additional vector of attack has its merits the underlying requirement to expose both arms (and hands) to attack could greatly dimish any practitioners enthusiasm :). It could also be that florentine fighting training systems aren't present in SCA period documentation because, like Miyamoto Musashi's niten'ichi, while demonstrably effective now no one ever thought to try it. Or that if they had the art was lost because they didn't live long enough to show anyone or bother writing it down. Again I doubt we will ever know for sure.
I'm sure there are many other reasons why one simply can't look up Sir Blah's book of florentine fighting but in any case we haven't managed to do so yet. Therefore we hope you stay tuned to our version instead and provide feedback on what you think.
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