The first fencing treatises, and the dates given for them.

The oldest surviving fencing manuals are museum objects, and their dates are estimates that differ between the museum, its own captions and the reference works. This page gives each date as each source gives it. These books are the roots of the sport, not its rules, and nothing here describes their techniques.

Royal Armouries MS I.33

The Royal Armouries holds a German manual of sword and buckler fencing, catalogued as MS I.33, which the museum describes as the oldest known European fencing manual, or Fechtbuch. The museum says nothing is known of the manuscript for its first 250 years or so, until the later 16th century, when someone who had looted it left a signature in it.

Three dates for one manuscript

Date given	Place	Who says so
Early 14th century, around 1330	Germany	Royal Armouries, the text of its online exhibition page, citing current research
Late 13th century	Not stated	Royal Armouries, the image caption on the same page
About 1300	Franconia	Wikipedia (secondary)

The museum's own text and caption do not agree with each other. Its text, which cites current research, is the fuller statement and places the manuscript about 1330.

Fiore dei Liberi and The Flower of Battle

The Public Domain Review, quoting the J. Paul Getty Museum, describes Fiore dei Liberi (in full, Fiore Furlan dei Liberi da Premariacco) as the greatest fencing master of the late 1300s and the author of Il Fior di Battaglia, The Flower of Battle. The Getty copy covers combat on foot with sword, dagger and axe, and combat on horseback. The same source says Nicolo III d'Este of Ferrara commissioned at least three copies.

The copies and their dates

Copy	Date given	Who says so
Getty, MS Ludwig XV 13	About 1410	The Getty, via the Public Domain Review; the Getty's own page could not be opened
Morgan Library, MS M.383	About 1410 to 1420	The Morgan, seen only in a search summary (unconfirmed)
Pisani-Dossi copy, Flos Duellatorum	1409 in the old reckoning, that is 1410	Wikipedia (secondary)

All three are institutional or reference-work dates for different copies, and no single date for Fiore's work is agreed.

The lost Spanish books

Valle Ortiz and Curtis, writing in 2009 in Materiales para la Historia del Deporte, a peer-reviewed Spanish sports-history journal, say that bibliographies record Spanish authors who published before Carranza and Pacheco but whose works have not been located. They name three:

Jayme Pons de Perpinya, dated 1474.
Pedro de la Torre, also dated 1474.
Francisco Roman, whose Tratado de la esgrima con figuras was printed in Seville by Bartolome Perez in 1532.

The disputes over Pons and de la Torre

Pons's date. The same paper notes that a 1618 letter by Pacheco de Narvaez implies a date around 1484, which the authors treat as a calculation error because Pacheco elsewhere gives 1474.
Whether Pons's book existed. The paper reports that the 19th-century writer Thomas Windsor (1891, as cited by Thimm) doubted any such book was printed at that time. The authors hold that 17th-century citations show the work existed, and point to a 1466 examination record from Perpignan naming a candidate as a former pupil of a master Jacobus Pons.
De la Torre's origin. The authors note that the bibliographer Gelli suggested Pedro de la Torre may have been Italian, or may have published in Italy.

Printed treatises in Italy

A fencing bibliography compiled by William Wilson at Northern Arizona University, together with a picture library's caption, is summarised in search results as dating Achille Marozzo of Bologna's Opera Nova to 1536, with later editions in 1550 and a posthumous reissue in Venice, Arte dell'Armi, in 1568. Neither page was read in full, so these dates are unconfirmed.

Camillo Agrippa's Trattato di Scientia d'Arme is described in a search summary of a Spanish academic journal article (Universidad Complutense) as the most important fencing book of Renaissance Italy. The article is a scanned document that could not be read, so that judgement is unconfirmed. Its printing date is left out here because the only source found for it was a bookseller's listing.

Spain: Carranza and the destreza

The founding text of the Spanish school known as the verdadera destreza is Jeronimo Sanchez de Carranza's book on the philosophy of arms, Libro que trata de la Philosophia de las armas y de su destreza. Valle Ortiz and Curtis cite it as printed at Sanlucar de Barrameda, in the author's own house, in 1582. They cite Luis Pacheco de Narvaez's Grandezas de la espada as following in Madrid in 1600.

Carranza's date is given two ways. The book's colophon says the work was completed in 1569, and some references, Wiktenauer and parts of Wikipedia among them, give 1569 as its date. Others give the 1582 printing as the publication date. The dispute itself was seen only in search summaries of wiki and enthusiast sources (the 1582 printing is also the date Valle Ortiz and Curtis cite), so the difference is between completion and printing as those sources describe it, not a settled fact.

France and the later manuals

Olympedia credits Henri de Saint-Didier of France with naming most of fencing's major movements in 1570. Two centuries later, the fencing historian Malcolm Fare, writing on an equipment maker's blog in 2019, notes that Domenico Angelo's L'Ecole des Armes, published in 1763, shows masks of leather or thin plate. What the manuals show about masks is followed up in the safety history, and the move from these schools to the three sporting weapons is on how the three weapons developed.

Sources