Lance, Spear, Sword, and Messer
Christian Tobler makes a deep dive into the fighting traditions of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, particularly as recorded by Johannes Liechtenauer (1300-1389). It was a time of plague, of the Hundred Years War, of the Peasants’ Revolt, but also a time when the origins of the European Renaissance were formed.
In the later years of this turbulent time a shadowy figure named Johannes Liechtenauer systematized lessons for swordsmanship, wrestling, armoured and mounted combat. Recorded in cryptic, rhyming verses, it fell to masters of the 15th and 16th century to record, clarify and expand the grandmaster’s instructions in an extensive body of fencing manuals. As the world of the knight receded into history, these texts — many extensively and beautifully illustrated — were forgotten by all but German-language antiquarians and fencing historians until the last decade of the 20th century, when they were rediscovered by a new audience of martial artists and historians.
No author has done more to reveal this lost world of German knightly martial arts to a modern audience than Christian Tobler. Lance, Spear, Sword and Messer is a rich collection of Tobler’s work, containing extensive material on topics as diverse as the two-handed sword, spear, poleaxe, wrestling, and the use of long shields, combined with thought-provoking analysis and historical commentary that will occupy the mind–and challenge the preconceptions–of students and historians of medieval German martial arts.
In addition, the martial career–in arms and in the literature of arms–of Emperor Maximilian I, often called “the Last Knight,” who was himself a devoted student of the tradition, serves as a capstone of this collection. Maximilian’s literary output, including a planned but unwritten fight book, was a similar capstone in his own lifetime at the waning of the Middle Ages and start of the Northern Renaissance.
No author has done more to reveal the lost world of German knightly martial arts to a modern audience than Christian Tobler. His Secrets of German Medieval Swordsmanship (2001) was the first complete English translation of a medieval fighting text combined with a textual and photographic interpretation of its hundreds of techniques. Since then, he has gone on to publish three translation-editions of other 15th-century combat treatises, and an extensive, fully illustrated training guide for students interested in the practical study of the art, Fighting with the German Longsword. His collection, In Saint George’s Name (2010), was an anthology of essays on the art. In 2021 he joined forces with Dierk Hagedorn to present a transcription, translation and analysis of the complete 15th-century manuscript of The Peter von Danzig Fight Book, devoted to the fencing tradition of German grandmaster Johannes Liechtenauer. Christian Henry Tobler is Principal Instructor for the Selohaar Fechtschule, a school for historical fencing.