"Also I say that none of my students, especially those mentioned above, have ever had a book about the art of combat, except for Sir Galeazzo da Mantova. Because he said that without books no one can be a good master or a good student in this art. And I, Fiore, confirm it to be true, because this art is so vast that there is no one in the world who has such a big memory to keep in mind the fourth section of this art without books. And not knowing the fourth section of this art I would not be a Master any more."

~ Fior di Battaglia (MS Ludwig XV 13)

Examining the Nine Petals of the Flower of Battle 

Much ink has been spilt on the subject of Master Fiore Furlano delli Liberi da Premariacco over the years—more, perhaps, than any other writer in the corpus of Renaissance martial arts literature save Johannes Liechtenauer himself. Scholars more capable than I have written at length about the society and culture that birthed and influenced the great master and lead to his Fior di Battaglia; I am ignorant of such things by comparison, and I have nothing to add to their work. Skilled martial artists have presented extensive and detailed interpretations of Fiore’s manuals; my own interpretations are rather different, but I find that they’re best presented in person. I eagerly read every work that is published in both of these categories, but my intent here is to contribute something rather different.  

The majority of scholars who study Fiore Furlano’s work agree that the only way to properly interpret the great master’s system, which is known in some quarters as l’arte dell’armizare, is by studying all of the extant copies of his manual together. I agree, and add that equally important are the derivative works written by later masters, especially his apparent heir Philippo di Vadi Pisano. In this article, I present some tools to help interested scholars to do just this: a full structural analysis and play-by-play comparison of Fiore’s four manuals and the derivative works of Vadi, Ludwig von Eyb, and the anonymous creator of the Codex 5278, as well as a comprehensive summary of the resources currently available both online and in print. It is my hope that this introduction will provide everything that a scholar needs to begin his own comparative analysis of the Flower of Battle.  

The Liberi Tradition  

Nine manuals are currently known to exist in Fiore Furlano’s tradition, six of them apparently written by the master himself. Here is a summary of the known information about each.  

 

The Getty, Morgan, and Novati are very similar in most respects, but have several notable differences. All three are illuminated, though almost entirely unpainted, manuscripts. All three include lengthy prologues in Italian; the Morgan and Getty prologues are nearly identical in the areas where they overlap, whereas the Novati’s prologue is both distinct from these and includes a separate section written entirely in Latin. The Novati states that Fiore had been studying the art for fifty years when he penned its prologue in February, 1410, while both the Getty and Morgan put his career at somewhat over forty years. The dates above are based on these figures, and discussion continues among scholars about the best way to narrow down those dates further.  

In the Getty and the Morgan, Fiore seeks to establish his credibility by telling of the many famous warriors who were his students or were defeated by his students. The Novati speaks instead of his martial lineage, declaring that chief among the many Italian and German masters he studied with was Johannes (called Suueno), himself a student of Nicholai de Toblem. The Getty and the Novati are both dedicated to the Marquis Niccolò III d’Este, laid out according to his wishes, while the Morgan contains no dedication and is arranged as Fiore himself thought best. Likely for this reason, the Getty and Novati begin with plays of grappling and move through progressively larger weapons—a traditional method of teaching the martial arts—while the Morgan begins with mounted plays and progresses in the opposite direction—a pattern common among German fighting manuals and following the typical progress of a formal duel. 

In the body of the work, each page contains one to six drawings, typically with explanatory text. Fiore employs a simple and effective scheme of presentation, with each section lead by a “master” in a golden crown demonstrating a simple counter technique, and following him a number of “scholars”  wearing golden garters and performing variations on his counter. Last of all comes another master, this time in both crown and garter, demonstrating the counter technique to the first master’s play. The Novati’s attempt at clarity in portraying the techniques results in figures almost cartoon-like in their simplicity, while the attempt at greater detail and complexity in the Getty and the Morgan at times results in misleading images and odd mistakes in the art. As a result, none of the three can be judged superior to the others in this area.

 

The Getty and the Morgan both accompany their images with lengthy and detailed descriptive passages cast in awkward Italian verse. The Novati, by comparison, includes only a couplet or quatrain with each image, and while these brief captions have more poetic value, they are not always successful in capturing the play. Spelling and grammar are inconsistent among the three manuals, and they were almost certainly penned and drawn by different hands. Though all three manuals claim to have been written and painted by Fiore Furlano himself, it seems likely that all are copies created by scribes at a later date from one or more older master versions. This is also a likely explanation for the level of variation we see among their content—even the Morgan, which some have suggested is merely an inferior copy of the Getty, contains many plays that set it apart from its fellow, describing them with the same level of detail as any other play in the book. While the possibility remains that Fiore did write all three of these copies at different times for his own reasons, it seems unlikely to me.  

I do not mention the Florius manuscript above because it stands somewhat apart from its fellows, and has far more in common with the work of Philippo Pisano than the other works of Fiore Furlano. Indeed, some have suggested that perhaps Florius or a copy like it inspired Vadi in the creation of his own manual. The lavish costumes in the Florius suggest a somewhat later date than Fiore’s other manuals, though still in the early fifteenth century. Like Vadi, the Florius is fully painted and lavishly illustrated, and contains only two images per page, though the Florius follows the same system of garters and crowns used in Fiore’s other works and Vadi’s book for the most part does not. Both the Florius and Vadi present their teachings in short couplets, like the Novati, though the Florius has much more content in common with it than the later manual does. Both also lack to an extent the clear and logical organization seen in Fiore’s other works; the Florius is ordered in a loosely similar fashion to the Morgan, with a great deal of chaos in exact placement of plays, while Vadi’s is essentially the same as the Getty and the Novati, except that the dagger and grappling segments were moved to the back (where it also begins to collapse into chaos).  

The differences between these two works are also notable. The Florius is the only manual in the tradition written entirely in Latin. Where the Florius has no introduction, Vadi’s prologue is many times as long as that of his predecessor, and highlights many aspects of Fiore’s system that are not obvious when looking at the plays alone—indeed, his multi-chapter prologue puts one in mind of the extensive treatises on martial concepts and principles valued by his contemporary German masters, though the differences between them are obviously considerable.

The Codices LXXXIV (MS 84) and CX (MS 110) were present in the Biblioteca Estense in Ferrara during the creation of the 1436 and 1508 catalogs. There is no further record of them, and they are currently considered lost. According to Novati, the MS 84 consisted of 58 folios bound in leather with a clasp, with a white eagle and two helmets on the first page. The MS 110 consisted of 15 small-format folios on unbound parchment, and was written in two columns. Neither of these descriptions matches any known Fiore manuscript, so they are generally considered to be distinct copies that will (hopefully) yet be discovered. 

The final two manuals in the tradition, the von Eyb Kriegsbuch and the Vienna codex, are significantly different from the others. Aside from the obvious fact of being German manuals, von Eyb includes no text describing the majority of his plays, and the Vienna contains none at all. They also contain a great deal of material not found in Fiore’s work. The main body of both texts is Konrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis, a famous manual on warfare popular in this time period. Most of the martial plays in these two books, however, are clearly drawn from Fior di Battaglia. Intermixed with these plays, however, are several that are far more reminiscent of Talhoffer or the Gladiatoria group. Additionally, both contain more complex and detailed systems of grappling than that laid out by Fiore, and these plays seem very similar to those in the Codex Wallerstein. Given that both of these manuals are compilation texts, it would be unsurprising if these sections were, in fact, copied from non-Fiore texts; on the other hand, the Vienna predates all three of these sources as well as von Eyb, appearing a mere decade after the assumed end of Fiore’s career, so Fiore’s direct influence cannot be discounted. 

Concordance 

As I have already mentioned above, the Getty stands out as the longest and most detailed of the manuals in this group. The only other that compares in length is the Novati, but the Getty’s extensive descriptions are occasionally useful for organizing plays from other sources. For these reasons, I will use it as the reference manuscript here. 

There are a few issues in the layout of the manuals that are worth mentioning in any structural analysis. Folio 38 is misplaced in the Getty, and should fall between folia 14 and 15. Folio 16 in the Morgan is misplaced, and should also fall between folia 14 and 15; the Morgan is also missing the sections on pollaxe, dagger, and grappling described in its introduction. The Novati’s folio 7r is out of order and should fall between folia 5v and 6r; this is likely the result of Francesco Novati accidentally shuffling the pages when he created the facsimile. There are a few places where the text is transposed or otherwise mismatched with the images, such as the stances of the sword in two hands in Vadi (ff 12v-13v) and the masters of the small stick in the Getty (f 8v-c, d). 

As the Florius is currently not available in transcription or translation, assignments are based on an analysis of the images alone, and a few may change when more research is possible. The grappling in the Vienna and von Eyb is far more complex and detailed than in the other Fiore manuscripts, and these plays are very difficult to place based on their images alone. A full analysis and comparison will have to wait until a transcription and translation of von Eyb is available. 

In this concordance, I’ve broken down each manual by folio and individual image, and labeled as in the image on the left. Where a single play occupies two positions or is in the center of a line, the label defaults to the left. Plays that occupy a whole page are not labeled with a letter. Images marked with an asterisk (*) contained crowned masters. A dagger (†) denotes a play that is similar to its counterpart in the Getty, while a double dagger (‡) indicates a different image for the same play. A box with an arrow indicates places where a play is not pictured in a manual, but is instead included in the text of the previous or subsequent play.    

 

  

Resources  

Here is a brief but thorough catalog of the resources available to the student of Fiore.   

THE MS LATIN 11269 (FLORIUS) 

High resolution scans of this manual are not freely available anywhere on the internet, nor has anyone yet gone to the effort of publishing it. The best images currently available are the low-resolution scans put online by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. They are large enough to be useful for study and comparison, though not for transcription and translation. The Bibliothèque nationale's site is very difficult to navigate and very inconvenient to download from, so I have gathered and organized links to all of the scans here. 

THE MS M.383 (MORGAN) 

Color scans of the Morgan Library & Museum MS M.383 were produced by the Princeton Index of Christian Art and are currently available as part of that database. The ICA's interest in the manual is as a work of art, and the method they used is indicative of this. Each page of the manuscript was reproduced at a low level of resolution, with its individual images further reproduced in higher resolution detail scans. 

These scans are intended to be hidden behind a paywall ($1000 per annum for institutional access), and the main access page for the ICA can be found here. For those who are not fortunate enough to have access to a research university or other institution with access to the Index, the images are still available. The paywall does not block direct links to the images, which can therefore be accessed from any computer. Below is a full list of these links.