I’ve been recently thinking about which fencing masters seem to me to have had the greatest influence on the development of the art, and put together a “top-ten” style list that I thought would be fun to present here. Though not ten – only nine. Why nine? Well…. Because.

A few points, though: first, this is a list of masters who I think have had the greatest influence on the development of the art of fencing. It is not a list of the masters who have had the greatest impact on modern HEMA/WMA revivals, it is not a list of masters who have written the most famous works, it is not a list of the masters who were the best fencers (which is impossible to judge, anyhow). It is not even a list of my favorites, or else Danet would definitely be here.

To be on this list, a master – either through a written work or their teaching, or both – had to have a major impact on the course of fencing, as an individual. So you won’t see someone like Marozzo, who is a big name with a popular book, but who was in my view more putting into writing the practices of an established school than pushing fencing down some kind of path. Nor will you see a name like Fiore De’i Liberi, who is greatly studied today but who left not that big a trace on fencing history between his time and modern reconstruction. Nor will someone like Charles Besnard show up, who gives us the first real insight into the evolution of the French school and so is very important today, but for whom we have no good information about the degree to which his work was innovative vs. reflecting developments common to many fencing masters in France at the time.

Obviously you may disagree and feel someone shouldn’t be on this list or someone else should be on it, or that the numbering is wrong. We all have our own pet. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?

Coming in at number one, none other than the founder of La Verdadera Destreza himself, Jeronimo Sanchez de Carranza. Carranza single-handedly assembled a system of fencing that differed qualitatively from everything else that anyone had seen, a system more closely interwoven with geometry and more complex than any fencing system that came before or would come after. His method was so successful that it dominated fencing in Spain for almost three centuries, and influenced fencing as far abroad as Italy and the Netherlands. With no Carranza there is no Narvaez, there is no Thibault. Thanks to Carranza, diestros were long feared as dangerous swordsmen in Europe. So, even though La Destreza went extinct sometime around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as far as we are aware, until its modern revival by Maestro Ramon Martinez, I think it is safe to say that while a few masters may have equaled Carranza in influence on the history of fencing, for certain none have exceeded him.

Camillo Agrippa. All right, I really wrestled with this one. First off, Agrippa was not actually a fencing master, as you’ve likely already said out loud. Also, it is not entirely clear to what degree Agrippa’s work depicts true innovation, and to what degree it provides mathematical description and argument for changes in fencing practice that were already in development in Italy at the time. For those reasons, we could easily take Agrippa off the list or bump him down it. For those reasons, I couldn’t justify putting him at number one.But… so many later masters quote Agrippa – supporting or deriding him – and so much of the Italian and French schools of fencing are rooted in ideas that we see first in his treatise, that it is still pretty hard to find any one name that screams out more than his. The Italian guard positions, the development of the lunge as a concept (if not an action – as we see in Meyer, folks were making lunge-like actions before Agrippa), the treatment of human motion… quite simply, his book is a keystone for all that followed in France and Italy down to even modern sport fencing. Plus, Agrippa’s approach to the geometry of fencing inspired numerous fencing masters across Europe down the years. We can’t really get by NOT putting Agrippa on this list.

Nicolas Texier La Boessiѐre. La Bo-who? Unless you’re a devotee of the French school, you may never have heard of choice number three, and even if you have, you’re likely asking yourself how he got to be this high on the list. Well, for starters, La Boessiѐre trained at least two highly influential masters: his son, Antoine, and Gomard pѐre. The former of these wrote THE major French treatise of the Napoleonic era, explicating his father’s concepts and establishing what we can think of as the quintessential classical French school; the latter trained the Gomard you are likely more familiar with, A.J.J. Posselier dit Gomard, his adoptive son, who put down the other major categorization of the classical French school in the mid-1800’s. Now, a lot of masters have trained influential masters without making it on this list, so what else makes La Boessiѐre pѐre – Nicolas – special? Well, for one thing, he was the chosen representative of the French masters’ academy to respond to what they viewed as Guillaume Danet’s heretical rebranding of French fencing nomenclature. For another, he trained the Chevalier de Saint Georges, who was regarded across Europe as one of the Gods of contemporary fencing, if not the greatest fencer alive during the end of the 18th century.

As related by his son and by the younger Gomard, La Boessiѐre also was the one who gave us more or less the same numbering system for attacks, parries, and engagements that the French school uses to this day, giving the name sixte, septime, and octave to the former quarte-sur-les-armes, demi-cercle/quarte basse, and quinte. More than this, he unified the naming system of parries and thrusts, which had always been treated disparately before. Before him, we had the thrust of tierce and the parry of the thrust of tierce, as we see in Angelo; we had the thrust of quarte-basse and the parry of demi-cercle, both of which, thanks to La Boessiѐre, are now unified into the hand position of septime. After La Boessiѐre, a tierce is a tierce is a tierce, no matter whether you are engaging, thrusting, parrying, beating, your hand is in pronation and you are striving to have your opponent’s blade outside of yours. It’s so logical that today we take it for granted and assume that the hand position numbering system of thrusts and parries has always been unified and consistent, but this was not always so — it’s thanks to La Boessiѐre that we have this very logical treatment of hand positions in the French school today.

But there’s another piece of La Boessiѐre’s legacy that you enjoy today, whether you know it or not – whether you are a traditional fencer, a sport fencer, or a HEMA practitioner. He invented the wire-mesh fencing mask, and changed the way free assaults and fencing training were conducted, forever. Before La Boessiѐre’s invention, as Gomard tells us, practice and assaults were highly conventional and cautious, and were performed at high risk – it was very easy to lose an eye with a stray thrust, even with the huge musket-ball size buttons people used to put on the ends of their foils. And multiple masters apparently suffered this fate. With the fencing mask, assaults could become more a simulacrum of true combat, and could be performed at full speed and intent. La Boessiѐre’s invention enabled the development of the Romantic school of fencing in the 1800’s, which sought an emphasis of combative reality in fencing, and allowed this combative approach to the assault to continue down to today’s traditional fencing. It enabled the sport of fencing to deploy flicks and flѐches and flunges at ballistic speeds. Without the fencing mask, the practice of ALL types of fencing today would be affected.

So say what you want, I’ll stand my ground with this one: La Boessiѐre pѐre was himself a God of fencing, no matter how you slice it.



4. Domenico Angelo may be more controversial than the next two, but I think there’s a solid case to put him high on the list. Angelo was arguably the most respected fencing master in the United Kingdom in the late 1700’s, and his fencing school in London was a renowned place to be seen for the well-to-do, during Domenico’s time there as well as the time of his son, Henry. But more than act as a famous master and found a fencing dynasty, Angelo was seen as the iconic representation of the French school of fencing not just in Britain, but in France as well – it is Angelo’s fencing treatise that forms the foundation of the fencing section in Diderot and D’Alembert’s legendary Encyclopedia. Moreover, Angelo’s treatise, appearing in both French and English and in multiple reprints, was the quintessential work on the French school for decades. All of this much to the chagrin of Guillaume Danet, who served as the head of the French syndicate and who pushed for his own treatise to feature in the Encyclopedia. And whose book, I think, is actually better. Now, is Angelo’s work characteristic of the French school as a whole? Yes. Does it make major innovations to the system? Not really, no, which is a sticking point for my criteria. But I still think Angelo needs to be here because Angelo reached down for generations as the paragon of French fencing – so much so that plates from Angelo’s treatise, I’d wager, are hanging on more walls in this world than those of any other fencing master.



5. Johannes Liechtenauer. Since about 9/10ths of HEMA practitioners are devotees of Meister Liechtenauer and his students, I’m sure there is at once no surprise that he is on this list, but shock and outrage that he is so far down the list. But no matter the number assigned, there is no doubt that Liechtenauer was a big deal for the history of fencing. The number of fencing master devotees in the German school that claimed descent from him and followed his teaching is huge. Centuries of German fencing theory and practice, in essence, had the shadow of this giant looming over it. ‘Nuff said.

6. Giuseppe Radaelli. The man, the legend. While I have argued that Radaelli did not strictly speaking, invent or found the Northern Italian school of sabre – but rather codified and developed practices already in play in Northern Italy for some time – his impact is irrefutable. It is very clear that the Northern school, as we understand it, comes to us through his filter. Not only did he develop the Italian system of sabre as we know it, and train numerous respected masters of both the sabre and the foil, his students spread across Europe taking that teaching with them. Austrian and Hungarian sabre traditions that extend down to the modern competitive era started in truth with Radaelli and his students. Radaelli, for example, is a major trigger for why Hungarians have always competed so strongly in modern Olympic-style sabre fencing. Radaelli’s system even made heavy encroachment into France; after leaving Austria, his student Luigi Barbasetti taught in Paris for some years.

7. Jules Jacob. France, mid 1800’s. The foil, some French masters say, is a decadent weapon, suited only for the salle. Foil training is not preparing men for the duel, but instead for polite public assaults. Something must be done so that young men can better handle the sword in earnest combat, and stem the tide of rising fatalities.Enter: Maître Jules Jacob, the de facto inventor of the French school of dueling sword fencing, or epée de combat. Taking the technique and theory of the classical foil as a foundation and re-infusing it with earlier theory and practice of the sword – but with a largely new emphasis on hits to the extended target (i.e., the sword arm), Jacob created something at once old and new, glorious in its simplicity, a fencing system notoriously unforgiving of errors, efficient and lethal for its purpose on the dueling ground. Georges Felizet, Anthime Spinnewyn, and others developed the system further in years after – Felizet published on the new style before Jacob ever did – but Jacob gets the credit for creating epée as we know it. And thanks to him, the shape of the sword changed with an expanded guard to better protect the hand, which even inspired the Greco brothers to create the Italian epée in the 20th century for assaults against the French. Likewise, the modern sport of epée fencing would not exist without him. If there is a master you who are reading this is likely not to have heard of, Jacob is the one, but his impact on fencing evolution was incontrovertible.

8. Masaniello Parise. By taking over the national military training of fencing masters in Italy after the death of Giuseppe Radaelli, Parise pushed hard for his Neapolitan school, and so made the Southern fencing style dominant in Italy for generations – especially as far as the sword/foil was concerned. The selection of Parise as the head of the school in Rome over any Northern master also set fire to decades of animosity between the Northern and Southern schools, which colored Italian fencing down into the twentieth century. Like him or not, Parise was a big deal, and he blew a breeze that filled the sails of Italian fencing for a long time. And on top of all that, even his Northern opponents had to admit that his skill with the sword was second to none.

9. Nicoletto Giganti. Let’s face it, Capo Ferro gets all the credit. Thanks to Egerton Castle, Arthur Wise, and The Princess Bride, when one thinks of quintessential Italian rapier, Capo Ferro’s pictures are the ones that come to mind. And yes, he did write a great book with great pictures. But Nicoletto Giganti, I think had greater influence. Both books picture a similar development in Italian fencing, they essentially depict a common method. Yet Giganti’s work was reprinted again and again, and translated into both French and German and dispersed north of the Alps. It also depicts what to my mind is a clearer pedagogy. And unlike their near-contemporary Salvator Fabris, the system that Giganti presents is clearly much more in line with later developments in Italian fencing (none of the awkward postures, for example, for which Fabris was so often criticized) – which is why I put Giganti here instead of Fabris, as voluminous and well-cited as Fabris’s work is. But I think the case can be made that Giganti is no less cited, and that his work is clearer. So no, we cannot say that Giganti himself was particulary innovative, as his fencing is characteristic of developments of the time, but he presented to later generations a readily accessible window into a dynamic, evolving system.

The contents of this post reflect my own views and opinions, and do not necessarily represent those of my masters at Martinez Academy of Arms. Any errors are fully my own, as I am still in training and have been encouraged to research to further my studies.