Four days in the summer of 1569 changed fencing forever…
The classical dialogue that Jeronimo Sanchez de Carranza created takes place in the summer of 1569 in the house of the duke of Medina-Sidonia. The characters are making jokes, telling stories, and talking about good fencing, bad fencing, and how to teach fencing. What Carranza describes is intimately familiar to anyone who fences and by that I mean a collection of friends gather together to share fellowship and talk about swordplay with food and drinks over a friendly weekend.
450 Years of Tradition
Some of the treasured moments of my life take place in a backyard or at a kitchen table with good friends doing exactly this.
When you consider a person like Carranza you need to understand that he was not a fencing master but rather someone in search of the truth of martial arts and he strongly believed that within this truth was a process that human beings could use to grow, seek knowledge, and make the world a better place through learning and training. Any one of us, regardless of our experience or title, has the potential to be Carrancine when we strive towards the martial truth, when we seek to become better, when we work to improve the world around us.
This year is the 450th anniversary of the summer of 1569 in which La Verdadera Destreza was born. In conjunction with the Chicago Swordplay Guild the Sacramento Sword School has been planning a grand celebration hosted at the Western Martial Arts Workshop in September of 2019. I don’t want to spoil the surprises that the CSG team has in store but I will say that if you are a diestro and you love the martial traditions of Iberia, you are welcome and you will find plenty of opportunities to learn, train, and fence.
WMAW 2019 – http://www.wmaw.us/2019/
Call it a birthday party and a ‘thank you’ to the tradition.