Italians and Daggers, Spanish and Body Angle

One peculiarity of the Spanish is that they tend to not use daggers. The Spanish masters mention them, and mention how to use them in passing, but in general they state that the single sword can defeat all combined arms. Why is this? Why do the Italians hold onto usage of the dagger so tightly, whereas the Spanish could take it or leave it? The Spanish use body angle and positioning to do the same thing that the Italians use daggers to do.

Such an artist. This depicts a top-view of fencers.

The point of using a dagger is to block your opponent's angle of attack. You want to force them to disengage around your dagger, which adds to the time it takes them to touch you. This, ideally, gives you time to perform actions like attacking.

This means that a dagger is useless unless you spread it outwards, pushing their blade outside of your body and maintain it there. You gain no utility if you just keep the dagger in front of you. Similarly, if you spread your dagger outwards before you are close enough, you just create an open line for your opponent to stab. So, to prevent stabbings, you need to get past your opponent's tip and then create an angle between your dagger and your body, which prevents their tip from reaching you.

(For the following, I am adopting the convention of arbitrarily using male pronouns for the fighter farther upwards, and female pronouns for the fighter farther downwards.)

For an example of this, see the "YES, GOOD" set of fighters. The person with the dagger cannot be stabbed without a disengage, unless her opponent either moves forward and creates an even larger angle with his sword. This can be countered by the dagger-holding fighter pulling her hand back.

I believe that a similar degree of defense can be accomplished simply from body angle. I have two assumptions to which you must ascribe here, to agree with me:

1. A proper chopping cut requires at least a quarter-turn of the blade, whether of the wrist, the elbow, or the shoulder.
2. A proper draw cut is slow, because it requires you to place the blade, then push or pull it while applying pressure. If you don't place and then pull or push, the blade will bounce ineffectually.
3. The thrust is the ideal attack, faster than either cut unless your sword is far off-line.

So, without further ado...

The person on the bottom was drawn without arms to accentuate the point about body angle.

As we can see, the distance matters. If you are past their tip, then you can prevent them from touching you based solely on body angle. This is something that the Italians do as well - a giarata is an attack which twists your body into a position which can't be easily attacked, while countering with your own thrust.

But yes - here, you're creating an angle that can't be dealt with by rotating your own body. In "NO, BAD", she has rotated wrongly and will be stabbed. In "YES, GOOD", she has rotated correctly and will not be stabbed.

So, now that I've given a hasty set of examples that body angle can defend in a way similar to how a dagger defends, let's look at how this applies to the Spanish.

Pronoun-wise, he has the sword, she's stepping around.

This circle is based on the arm and sword of the fencer with the sword. As you can see, the positions shown for the diestro without the sword follow the same angulation shown in the above "YES, GOOD" set of fighters.

Note that here, the fighter without a sword is assumed to start opposite the fighter with the sword.

(As an aside - the diestro realistically would not maintain the same direction all the way around the circle. When she steps from the top position to the upper-left position, she would step and put the left side of her body forward, allowing her to grab her opponent's hilt or blade and perform a Movement of Conclusion.)

Being more specific - a diestro steps around the circle, keeping the front half of her body closer to the line of her opponent's sword than the back half of her body. This means that her opponent must correct their direction first, then thrust. This effect is exacerbated when the diestro has a shorter sword than her opponent - the circle is tighter, and by the time she has crossed one or two steps around the circle, she is past her opponent's tip.

My phone makes interesting choices about which direction to orient images.

The above image shows the arc of "past the tip" for a long, medium, and short sword. As you can see, the diestro is past the tip after two steps. If her opponent were to step forward at the same time, the arc would move and she would be past the tip after one step with a long weapon.

This is the same movement as the Italian giarata, except that the Spanish fencer gets there faster due to her upright posture, rather than the Italian who has to push his leg around behind him, depending on how squarely his body is situated.

The diestro's movement around the circle accomplishes the goal of being safe from thrusts using body angulation alone, without adding anything else, even an off-hand.

(As an aside, I plan to attempt to use this along with explicit taking-of-the-blade to work on my game of fighting against case fighters with single rapier and rapier-and-dagger.)

So, as we've seen above, Italians create safety with their daggers by widening the angle between the tip of their opponent's sword and their body. This relies on positioning - trying to make a wide angle between their tip and your body doesn't matter if you aren't past their tip yet. This is similar to how when a diestro steps around the circle, her body angle creates safety from thrusts after she crosses a certain line. The front half of her body acts as a parrying device, refusing to allow her opponent's tip to touch the rest of her body. In this way, body angulation allows the Spaniard to obtain the same effect as using two implements, where the Italian would prefer to use a dagger. This means that body angulation can be effectively used to act as an additional implement.

(As another aside - I think that Fabris's forward body posture can act on the same principle, and I am eager to try it more after having written this post.)