Marozzo fightersBiblioOdyssey recently posted scans of a 16th-century fighting manual by fencing master Achille Marozzo, illustrating various techniques.

My brother is interested in such things so I sent him the link. He responded with this essay:

I have actually practiced Marozzo’s techniques for disarming an opponent of his dagger — they’re pretty effective.

Marozzo’s work is one of only a handful of medieval & renaissance martial arts texts that survive. They are enjoying a resurgence of interest and good translations are starting to appear.

It has been the tendency to think of Asian martial arts as being preeminent, although it is really the western martial arts that predominate globally (think of guns, missiles, etc.).

What has been forgotten are the pre-modern European hand-to-hand combat systems, many of which were very highly developed. Unfortunately, many of them were never recorded, as schools tended to be secretive about their techniques.

Even systems that were recorded are difficult to reconstruct; the meanings of terminology and references is often obscure, and knowledge taken for granted by the authors no longer exists. Still, much progress has been made, and it is clear that these systems were very sophisticated and effective, and integrated a variety of weapons and unarmed techniques.

- Geoff Jones