Compiling a fencing legacy rooted in the teachings of Salvator Fabris

Abstract

While numerous fencing masters and other enthusiasts wrote down their ideas on how to fence, and how to teach fencing, most of these works now exist without strong martial context, as the authors rarely inform us who taught them how to fence. With Historical European Martial Arts, the legacy of the 16th to 17th century fencing master Salvator Fabris may be one rare exception to this. After Fabris published his major work, Lo Schermo, in Copenhagen in 1606, and then returned to Padua (where he died in 1618), numerous works on fencing where written and published by authors who either claimed to have been students of Salvator Fabris himself, or of one of his students in turn; or to have some other connection to Signor Salvatore. As subsequent works by other authors may be linked to those works and authors in turn, we are able to sketch out instructional and textual lineages that are rooted in the well-known teachings of Fabris.

In this paper, we aim to identify potential students of Salvator Fabris, as well as their students in turn. Doing so, we will focus specifically on those students who became fencing masters themselves and those who wrote their own treatises on fencing (both fencing masters and other enthusiasts) – i.e., on those who left behind a documentable legacy through which the subsequent evolution of Fabris’s style of fencing in the 17th and 18th centuries can be studied.