Walk the streets of the Fencing Masters
Most HEMA or WMA practitionersknow the names of fencing masters like Hans Talhoffer, Paulus Kal, and themysterious Hanko Döbringer. More serious students of historical fencing haveread these masters discourses on the KunstDes Fechtens, in their own words. Many of us have followed their guidancefrom routine training to fencing tournaments and beyond.
These enigmatic people belongedto another world, one very different from our own. And yet, the 15thCentury wasn’t so long ago. Personal artifacts such as swords, books, evenclothing that may have been held or worn by someone who personally knew thesefencing masters are still around. So are tens of thousands of records detailingthe lives of people in this era, including the masters themselves. Late medievalEurope was highly literate and surprisingly well documented. The data is there,in other words, but it is rarely very accessible.
You may have spent hours tryingto decipher obscure parts of the fencing manuals, and struggled to make senseof them. Have you ever wondered about the lives of the fencing masters, of thepeople they worked for, and those they fought against? Are you curious aboutthe world they lived in? Could better familiarity with their world help unlocksome of the secrets of the fechtbücher?
The Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic, Volume 1, is a travel guideto the Medieval Baltic, circa 1456. This book is essentially an encyclopedia ofa specific part of Central Europe in the Mid-15th Century. This book will takethe reader into the misty primordial forests of pagan Lithuania, at a time whenthe Northern Crusades are still taking place with raids by the Teutonic Knightsand counter-raids by the Lithuanians. The great Free Cities of Prussia, led byDanzig, are in the middle of a revolution against the Teutonic Order, and haveformed an alliance with Poland. The King of Poland is from a Lithuanian family,and his parents were pagans, who burned their enemies alive as sacrifices tothe forest gods. King Casimir IV Jagiellon is however a prudent and wiseleader, who governs by consensus, walking a fine line between the manycompeting interests in his vast land.
Surrounding the Poland to theeast one finds the Golden and Crimean hordes of the Mongols, the ancientRussian City State of Novgorod, and the Mongol dominated but increasinglypowerful Russian state of Muscovy. In the north west are Pomerania, led by theGriffin Dukes, and the Mark of Brandenburg, led by the ruthless noble,Frederick II "The Iron", the prince elector of Brandenburg. To the south, behind a ring of mountains, the hereticKingdom of Bohemia, whose war-wagons defeated five Crusades, and whose Czechheretics fight as mercenaries on both sides of wars in Poland and Prussia. Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic takesyou into this world, and shows you the military, economic, and politicalorganization of Central Europe in 1456. If you want to know the streets andalleys walked by the likes of Hans Talhoffer, this is your ticket to a placethat is nothing like what you thought the middle ages were all about, and isfar more interesting, nuanced and engaging than any fantasy genre you've everexplored.
