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Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2018 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2018 And in War Brings Honor Jeremy Paul Wolf Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018 Part of the Medieval History Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Wolf, Jeremy Paul, "And in War Brings Honor" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2018. 181. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/181 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. And In War Brings Honor. Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College By Jeremy Wolf Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2018 1 Acknowledgements I would first like to thank Professor Alice Stroup, whose deft and thoughtful application of pressure kept my otherwise meandering work on track, and who constantly pushed me to answer one question after the next in pursuit of a deep and thorough research project in a subject that neither of us initially knew anything about. I would next like to thank Professor Richard Aldous for faithfully advising me through my occasionally bumpy Bard College career, and whose thoughtful and optimistic advice always shored up my faith in myself and my studies. I am grateful to Professor Gregory Moynahan, for lending his expertise on the place and time of my Project to my board and to my research. And to Mike Edelson, my HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) instructor, for introducing me to and educating me in the subject which inspired my research. Finally, a big thanks to all my friends and family who offered their advice and proofreading skills throughout the process. It’s no understatement to say that without the help of a great many people, this project would not exist. 2 Preface The original inspiration for this project arose out of my involvement with the Historical European Martial Arts community, and my effort and training to learn the fighting styles described in the manuals of the Holy Roman Empire, among others. In 2013, when I first started learning HEMA (at the time, fencing in the style of 16th century Italian Rapier) I already had a pretty good idea that my continuing academic career was going to focus on History. By my first year of college in 2014, when I started expanding my studies to 15th century German Longsword, that idea had not changed. Despite some brief forays into World War II and other historical periods, the Middle Ages and early Renaissance remained my chief area of interest. By the time I had officially moderated into History, my interest in historical fencing remained very strong. When the time came for me to start considering what my Senior Project was going to be about, my canned answer was “I don’t know, something about swords I guess…” So, in the Summer of 2017 when I sat down to formulate a strong, concrete idea for a project, I realized that despite my study of the fighting and the sources in HEMA, if someone had asked me how the fighting and instructional manuals related to the society that created them, I would not have been able to answer. There, I thought, was my project: describing the context surrounding this written swordplay tradition in a thorough fashion, so that anyone who studied the manuals could refer to this to understand how exactly these texts related to the history at large. In pursuit of this idea, I first had to learn many things that I hadn’t realized I didn’t know when I started the project. I had to learn and explain how the culture and government of the Empire worked. I had to figure out how bearing arms related to self-defense, how self-defense related to communal defense, and understand how these rights related to other rights and the social makeup surrounding towns and villages at large. The sheer scope of the knowledge I lacked was intimidating, but luckily for me I assembled a bibliography of books with rather elegant explanations that, with the help of Professor Alice Stroup, I was 3 able to piece together into an understandable summary. The project became less about the texts that were my original inspiration, and more about the increasingly compelling Martial Culture which illuminated itself in bits and pieces in brief mentions in books about the economics of urban communes, or as relatively minor chapters about militia in medieval warfare books mainly concerned with knights and mercenaries. This shift in priorities made me realize how confusing the texts had become. The connections between the texts and the culture I expected to find failed to materialize as I continued to study the subject, and by February, Mike Edelson, the chief instructor of the HEMA club to which I belong, became convinced that the fencing described in the texts we studied was not what we thought it was. By that point, I was not surprised by this idea, and I realized that the difficulty I was having connecting the texts to what had become the subject of my project was not because I had somehow overlooked an important facet of research, but because in fact the connections I expected to see were not there. The swordplay I practiced seemed to have an extremely tenuous connection to the Martial Culture I had been researching since September. Ultimately, this is a project about two things: Firstly, the Martial Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, the scale and importance of which was absolutely beyond my comprehension at the outset of this project. Secondly, the utterly confounding scale of my misapprehension concerning the relationship that the German written tradition of armed combat had to 15th century reality, and what that might mean. Of course, if there’s one thing more exciting in History than discovering that you’re correct, it’s discovering that you’re wrong. 4 Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................................. 1 Preface .................................................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 7 Notes on terms of geography......................................................................................................................... 10 Notes on classifications of Arms. ................................................................................................................... 11 The Empire in the 15th century ........................................................................................................................... 13 The Free Imperial City .................................................................................................................................... 15 Life within the city .......................................................................................................................................... 18 Burghers ..................................................................................................................................................... 18 Rights ......................................................................................................................................................... 20 Martial Virtue ................................................................................................................................................. 25 Military and War in the 15th century .................................................................................................................. 29 Soldiers and recruitment ................................................................................................................................ 32 Militia ............................................................................................................................................................. 32 Weapons and Material ....................................................................................................................................... 34 Swords and Blades ..................................................................................................................................... 34 Polearms and Heavy weapons ................................................................................................................... 45 Bows, Crossbows, and Firearms. ............................................................................................................... 46 Weapons in Art .......................................................................................................................................... 47 Material History conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 50 Textual evidence ................................................................................................................................................
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