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Difference between revisions of "Paulus Hector Mair"

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'''[71] One More Throw'''
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Present yourself like this in this piece from the approach: Step in there with your right leg and stab him with a high thrust to his face or chest. If he thrusts from above at you like this, and you are also standing in a high thrust against him, then take the thrust away to your left side with the cross of your dagger. In the same moment, grab his right arm from below with your left hand close by his hand. If he then wants to grab you with his left hand upon your right, then allow your dagger to fall and seize his left hand with your right. In that moment, settle yourself very low in the scales with your body and kick him in the stomach with your left leg as you lower yourself to fall over backwards. As you fall, come to the help of your left leg with your right. Thus, you fling him over yourself using both your legs.
 
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Revision as of 14:59, 2 January 2015

Paulus Hector Mair

"Mair", Cod.icon. 312b f 64r
Born 1517
Augsburg, Germany
Died 10 Dec 1579 (age 62)
Augsburg, Germany
Occupation
  • Civil servant
  • Historian
Nationality German
Movement
Influences
Genres
Language
Notable work(s) Opus Amplissimum de Arte
Athletica
Manuscript(s)
First printed
english edition
Knight and Hunt, 2008
Concordance by Michael Chidester
Translations Traduction française
Signature Paulus Hector Mair Sig.png

Paulus Hector Mair (1517 – 1579) was a 16th century German civil servant and fencing enthusiast. He was born in Augsburg in 1517 to a wealthy and influential family in the German middle class (Bürger). In his youth, he likely received training in fencing and grappling from the masters of Augsburg fencing guild, and early on developed a deep fascination with fencing manuals. He began his civil service as a secretary to the Augsburg City Council; by 1541, Mair was the Augsburg City Treasurer, and in 1545 he also took on the duty of Master of Rations.

Mair lead a lavish lifestyle and maintained his political influence with expensive parties and other entertainments for the burghers and city officials of Augsburg. Despite his personal wealth and ample income, Mair spent decades living far beyond his means and taking money from the Augsburg city coffers to cover his expenses. This embezzlement was not discovered until 1579, when a disgruntled assistant reported him to the Augsburg City Council and provoked an audit of his books. Mair was arrested and tried for his crimes, and hanged as a thief at the age of 62.

While Mair is not known to have ever certified as a fencing master, he was an avid collector of fencing manuals and other literature on military history, and some portion of his embezzlement was used to fund this hobby. Perhaps most significant of all of his acquisitions was the partially-completed manual of Antonius Rast, a Master of the Longsword and one-time captain of the Marxbrüder fencing guild. The venerable master died in 1549 without completing it, and Mair ultimately was able to produce the Reichsstadt "Schätze" Nr. 82 based on his notes. In sum, he purchased over a dozen fencing manuscripts over the course of his life, many of them from fellow collector Lienhart Sollinger (a Freifechter who lived in Augsburg for many years). After Mair's death, this collection was sold at auction as part of an attempt to recoup some of the funds Mair had appropriated.

Already in Mair's lifetime some of his people's Medieval martial arts were being forgotten; this was tragic to Mair, who viewed the arts of fencing as a civilizing and character-building influence on men. In order to preserve as much of the art as possible, Mair commissioned a massive fencing compendium titled Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica ("The Greatest Work on the Athletic Arts"), and in it he compiled all of the fencing lore that he could access. He retained famed Augsburg painter Jörg Breu the Younger to create the art for the text, and according to Hils Mair also hired two fencing masters to pose for the illustrations.[citation needed] This project was extraordinarily expensive and took at least four years to complete. Ultimately, three copies of the massive fencing manual—six volumes in all—were produced, the first entirely in Early New High German, another entirely in New Latin, and a third including both languages.

Whether viewed as a noble scholar who made the ultimate sacrifice for his art or an ignoble thief who robbed the city that trusted him, Mair remains one of the most influential figures in the history of Kunst des Fechtens. By completing the fencing manual of Antonius Rast, Mair gave us valuable insight into the Nuremberg fencing tradition, and his extensive commentary on the uncaptioned treatises in his collection serves to make useful training aids out of what would otherwise be mere curiosities. Finally, while his collection of manuscripts was dispersed after his death, most been preserved to this day instead of disappearing as did so many others, significantly expanding the corpus of historical European martial arts literature.

Treatise

In addition to the three manuscripts that Mair commissioner personally detailed below, Mair is known to have collected the following during his life:

Manuscripts

Books

Personal Compendiums

Much of Mair's content represents his revision and expansion of the older treatises listed above, including adding descriptive content to uncaptioned images. Where available, these images are displayed for in the left-most column, labeled "Source Images", for comparison purposes. Mair's own illustrations appear in the second image column.

Additional Resources

  • Hunt, Brian. "Paulus Hector Mair: Peasant Staff and Flail." Masters of Medieval and Renaissance Martial Arts. Ed. Jeffrey Hull. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-58160-668-3
  • Knight, David James, and Hunt, Brian. The Polearms of Paulus Hector Mair. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-58160-644-7

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Chronicon Abbatis Urspergensis, the Chronicle of Burchard of Ursberg (13th century), printed in Augsburg 1515.
  2. The amphitheatre of Fidenae (the modern Borgata Fidena, a suburb of Rome), endowed by a freed slave named Atilius, collapsed in 27 BC under the weight of a large crowd of spectators, apparently due to faults in construction. According to the (likely exaggerated) account by Tacitus (Annales, 4.63), a total of 50,000 people died in the collapse.
  3. wohl Gaius Sallustius Crispus Passienus (starb 47 n. Chr.)
  4. The preceding three paragraphs are missing in the Dresden version.
  5. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (ca. 71 – ca. 135), author of De vita Caesarum (ca. AD 120).
  6. Dresden version: four hundred.
  7. Marcus Antonius Gordianus Pius (225 – 244), Marcus Iulius Philippus (ca. 204 - 249)
  8. Claudius Galenus of Pergamum (AD 131 – 201)
  9. This may be in reference to 2 Timothy 2:4, rendered by Luther (1522) as: Niemant streyttet vnnd flicht sich ynn der narung geschefft, auff das er gefalle dem, der yhn zum streytter auffgenomen hat "None who would fight does meddle in the business of sustenance, so that he may please him who employed him as a fighter". Now Luthers narung "sustenance, nutrition, food" offers itself to an interpretation of "gluttony; carnal pleasure", but it translates pragmateiai biou, meaning "the pragmatics of life", i.e. "everyday business". c.f. Tyndale (1526), who has "No man that warreth, entangleth himself with worldly business, and that because he would please him that hath chosen him to be a soldier"; Dresden has "temporal" (zeitlich) rather than "transient" (zergenglich).
  10. This is a reference to Pliny, Nat. Hist. 30.32: "When a freedman of Nero was giving a gladiatorial show at Antium, the public porticoes were covered with paintings, so we are told, containing life-like portraits of all the gladiators and assistants. This portraiture of gladiators has been the highest interest in art for many centuries now, but it was Gaius Terentius who began the practice of having pictures made of gladiatorial shows and exhibited in public; in honour of his grandfather who had adopted him he provided thirty pairs of Gladiators in the Forum for three consecutive days, and exhibited a picture of the matches in the Grove of Diana."
  11. Anacharsis the Scythian, according to Herodotus (4.46, 76 f.) brother of the Scythian king Saulinos; attributed to him are inventions such as the anchor, bellows and pottery wheel. He was slain by his brother after he returned from a journey to Greece and began to advocate Greek culture to his countrymen. He is sometimes counted as one of the Seven Sages of Athens. Among a number of letters attributed to him is one addressed to the Lydian king Croesus.
  12. Johannes Aventinus (Johann Georg Turmair von Abensberg, 1477–1534), historiographer at the Bavarian court.
  13. Gampar is the seventh king in the (fictional) genealogy of the kings of the ancient Germans going back to the Great Flood in Aventinus' Annales (1522). Aventinus gives Gampar's regnal years as 1711–1667 BC.
  14. Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 275 – 339)
  15. Pittakos of Mitylene (Lesbos), 7th c. BC, one of the Seven Sages. He led the Mitylenians against the Athenians and arranged a duel with Phrynon, an Olympic champion in pankration, by which to settle the war. He defeated Phrynon by trapping him in a net. The greater Ajay met Hector in place of Achilles (Iliad 7.181), the fight lasted the entire day and Hector was lightly wounded, and the heroes then parted with mutual respect. Porus, "king of India" was defeated by Alexander in the battle of Hydaspes in 326 BC. I have so far failed to identify Pyrechmen and Degmemnus.
  16. Mair gives more detail on this judicial duel of 1409 in the second volume. According to this account, the combatants were Wilhelm Marschalk von Dornsberg and Theodor Haschenacker, and the shields of the combatants were preserved in St. Leonard's church outside of the city until the tower of this church was demolished on 3 November 1542.
  17. Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata ("Sayings of kings and emperors") in Plutarch's Moralia.
  18. Vienna: mit schaden "with damage", Dresden: mit schanden "with dishonour/ignominy".
  19. Tacitus' Germania was unknown during the medieval period; rediscovered in 1455, the text was popularized in German humanism only from c. 1500; it is summarized by Aventinus, who is Mair's source, in his Annales ducum Boiariae (1522), the German-language edition of which (Bairische Chronik 1533) was just about ten years old when Mair wrote his text.
  20. pafese read for gafese (i.e. pavese, the infantry shields comparable to the Roman rectangular shields of the early imperial period)
  21. Tuisto is the primeval god of the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus. Aventinus euhemerizes him as the grandson of Noah and first king of the Germans (r. 2214–2038 BC). Herman here is not the historical Arminius, but the fifth king in Aventinus' list (r. 1820–1757 BC), founder of the Herminones or continental Germans.
  22. Mair's source is the Turnierbuch of Georg Rüxner (c. 1490), edited in Augsburg by Marx Würsung (1518). Rüxner describes a series of 36 "imperial tournaments" (Reichs-Turniere) between 938 and 1487, beginning with a legendary tournament held in Magdeburg during what Rüxner makes out as the reign of Henry I the Fowler.
  23. the successive Habsburg emperors Frederick III, Maximilian I and Charles V, spanning the period since the supposed disestablishment of the knightly tournament and the establishment of the Brotherhood of St. Mark or Marxbrüder. The Freifechter denounced by Mair seem to represent an early form of the guild later known as Federfechter (unless the term still has a generic meaning, frei as in "unincorporated").
  24. Schlaraffenland is the German adaptation of Coquaigne (Cucania), first encountered in the 15th century (as schlauraff, schluderaffe) and popularised by Hans Sachs (1558). The name seems to originate as an (unattested) medieval slur meaning "lazy idler", schlu(de)r-affe, lit. "drooping ape".
  25. Ninus: the legendary founder of Nineveh according to Ctesias (Persica, ca. 400 BC); Ctesias' Sardanapolus corresponds to Ashurbanipal (669 - 627 BC); Ctesias is a rather unreliable source by comparison with Herodotus and the Ptolemaic king list; but in any case knowledge on the Assyrian empire was very limited before the decipherment of cuneiform in the 1850s.
  26. Gideon: Judges 7:4-7; David: Psalm 144:1: "Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight" (KJV).
  27. 'Long edge' is not listed in ty.
  28. sic : beide
  29. Marginalie unleserlich
  30. ”streck dein leyb und deine armen wol”
  31. sic : seinem ?
  32. The words are marked with numbers above. Probably it is to keep track of word order.
  33. sic : hinndersich
  34. sic : widerumb
  35. sic : seinem
  36. sic : schniten
  37. sic : seinnen ?
  38. 21r
  39. Corrections indicate it should be zu Im hinein
  40. The illustration suggests that this action should be done to your left side, rather than to your right.
  41. "Not the lower point". Why the awkward construction here? Why not say superiorem mucronem (or proper Latin equivalent)?
  42. Literally: put
  43. Literally: pull back the left foot
  44. German: his
  45. German: grab with your left hand from below outside over his right arm
  46. rechten
  47. Barred, or bolted.
  48. Pliers, or fire-tongs.
  49. Wrestlers wear a leather collar? Hmmm...
  50. Comb, carder?
  51. A variant on the o-goshi in judo.
  52. sic : Im mit
  53. »sst« oberhalb der Zeile korrigiert aus »fft«
  54. A technique for putting the opponent down head first with his feet in the air.
  55. Dagger pommel?! I have actually no idea what he is thinking here. My only guess is that it was late on Friday afternoon, and must have mistaken ”kopff” with ”knopff”.
  56. Which is what?
  57. Note: Change of grip required, or the illustration does not match.
  58. Dagger transfer necessary at this point.
  59. Note: person on left side starts with the dagger in the left hand according to the illustration.
  60. Note: push down, not out
  61. Arbait - technical term: work, force, struggle
  62. Vienna and Munich MS Latin: right.
  63. read: locitur
  64. Latin: snatch up.
  65. Note: the illustration shows ice-pick grip.
  66. "You will lick it!" Not pleasant if the dagger is lying on it. Especially in cold weather.
  67. May not represent the changing though described.
  68. Note illustration shows ice-pick grip.
  69. Note: left is corrected from a right. Left is correct.
  70. This seems to imply both parallel action and simultaneity.
  71. Reib - strong twisting, bending, rotating motion.
  72. Image shows left.
  73. From the inner side.
  74. From the Latin text
  75. Correct from underich.
  76. Could also mean immediately
  77. Only in the Latin.
  78. Inn - unclear whether directional or locational.
  79. The one in the left hand?
  80. Only in the Latin.
  81. Possible abbreviation of gegen – geg.
  82. Odd squiggle in the middle—f from previous line?
  83. Scribal error for pungito?
  84. Strange squiggle above the c.
  85. Squiggle – looks like the Munich MS symbol for us?
  86. Error for interim?
  87. Written as “in Clinando”
  88. NB, likely scribal error for “laevam”
  89. Second u has three dots almost like ǜ.
  90. Error for dextrum?
  91. sic : verborgnen