May '25: in which I start beef with an entire nation
This piece uses two main sources, Silkfencing’s discussion of Starzewski’s life and Daria Izdebska’s translation of the original manuscript. I recommend reading both if you’ve got the time.
So, I’m not a historian, not formally anyway.
All HEMA requires us to be historians though, half of this art is swordfights and the other half of it is reading historical fencing treatises to learn the stuff to do in swordfights. The problem is – like a lot of bad history – there’s a tendency to take historical texts at face value, to assume nobody is ever lying, nobody is ever wrong, nobody is ever operating through a lens with wildly different assumptions about the world, and to give a concrete example of what all that means I have to open a huge can of worms, because we’ve gotta talk about Polish Sabre Fencing.
Okay so Polish sabre is one of two things:
- The ultimate secret technique that will allow you to effortlessly defeat all your opponents
- Ahistorical bunkum based on nationalist ramblings
The answer is, of course, a bit more complicated than that, and a little bit of both, though a lot more of the latter. Let’s get into it.
OH GOD OH FUCK I SAID I’M NOT A HISTORIAN RIGHT WHY AM I DOING THIS
Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries was not a fun place. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapsed, and between 1772 and 1795 was cut into pieces and divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poland – as an independent state – ceased to exist for over a century.
Into this comes a man called Michał Starzewski. Born into the Austrian partition of Poland, he spent the first chunk of his adulthood working as a teacher, until 1830, when he took part in the November Uprising, a revolt in Russian-occupied Warsaw that lasted just under a year before being crushed by the Imperial Russian Army. Despite the bloody way the revolt ended, Starzewski returned to Austrian-controlled Tarnów as a hero, where in 1839 he was appointed to the Austrian military as a fencing master.
In 1846 he survived the Galician Slaughter, where the Austrian government orchestrated nobles and landowners to massacre the revolting Polish peasant class. In 1849 he moved to Kraków, where he set up a private fencing school which he taught at for almost the rest of his entire life. He died in 1894, in a still-occupied and still-divided Poland.
It’s not 100% clear when Michał Starzewski wrote his fencing manual. His grandson Józef claims it was in 1839, shortly after the November Uprising. It was not published in his lifetime, but his family held onto the manuscript, and Józef managed to have it published in 1930.
It is … an interesting read. Daria Izdebska describes the text better than I ever could:
“Starzewski’s language is colourful and full of bizarre turns of phrase. He is not writing in pure 19th century Polish, but rather attempting to imitate 17th century Old Polish, with varying degrees of success. He wants to bring the legendary world of his forefathers to life for his potential readers, and there is a degree of literariness to his style. He coins new expressions (for instance, the system for naming cuts he provides is probably his own invention, as there are no references to these names in earlier sources) and uses existing words and phrases in a different fashion, which means that quite often the dictionaries of historical Polish are tremendously unhelpful. It would probably be fair to say that his treatise is a mixture of solid facts, good fencing advice, fancy anecdotes, shoddy terminology, with a bit of shameless panache thrown in for good measure, and a dash of true patriotic spirit.”
See this is the problem with Starzewski: he’s not saying “I’m a 19th century sabre guy telling you things I’ve learned in the field”, he’s telling you that he’s travelled Poland collecting 16th and 17th century !SABRE SECRETS! told to him by ancient men with very many battle scars. Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries was very much different from Poland in the 19th. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a European power player. He’s harking back to a glorious golden past when Poland was free of oppression. In his most (in/)famous paragraph, he writes:
“This cut has occasionally been called the Turkish cut, because we would cut the bellies of the Turks open using this cut, and during the diets [sejmik], many a nobleman would cut open the knot on the sash of the Voivode, but did not do more than that, which meant: “With respect, but cuttingly, Sir!” and then the Voivode knew who he was dealing with – and it wasn’t too bad for him in those times. Sometimes, a German would come here with his own weapon – and would almost always receive as a souvenir this cut, and so, in trepidation, they named our low-cut: DIE HÖLLISCHE POLNISCHE QUARTE [The Hellish Polish 4th]”
Yes, he’s saying they cut their opponents’ belts off to make their pants fall down, and most discussion of this topic ends at the fact that it’s a hilariously looney-tunes-ass way to end a fight, but I do think it’s relevant to our discussion that he explicitly brings a German into it, to be humiliated and defeated by those canny Poles.
It’s not all like that, much of it is … pretty solid 19th century sabre fencing, not particularly distinct from what everybody else was doing at the time, but everybody was doing it because it was effective. It can’t just be that though, it needs to be the ancient lost secret techniques that made the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth a major power. So alongside the boring-but-conventional 19th century stuff he mixes in these stories, these fanciful techniques, these little literary flourishes. He’s a good storyteller! Part of the reason I tell people to read Starzewski is that he’s genuinely a very engaging writer and storyteller, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn he was a teacher. If you take him for what he is, it’s not a bad book.
Oh man it would be a shame if lots of modern HEMAists took him entirely at face value on that one huh.
MODERN HEMAISTS TAKE STARZEWSKI ENTIRELY AT FACE VALUE
It starts with The Polish Saber by Richard Marsden. To Marsden’s credit he tries to be careful about the veracity of Starzewski’s claims, and it does not matter, because everybody who tells you that Polish Sabre is the super secret ultra death technique, when challenged, will point to Marsden and say NO IT’S IN A BOOK, BY A HISTORY PROFESSOR. It’s also a book that has some unusual citations, including a US Cavalry Manual from 1907. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise at trying to cobble together an otherwise-lost style of fencing from disparate sources, many of them not even Polish.
It’s also a whole thing. I’ve never met somebody into Polish Sabre who was normal about it. You know when you mention Google on social media and fifty guys pop up telling you to use DuckDuckGo or whatever? That’s Polish Sabre Guys in every conversation. No no you can’t do that pussy Hungarian shit, that’s not a real combat art, you’ve gotta do real manly sabre, manly sabre will smash through your opponent’s guard like it’s nothing. Let me tell you about THE HELLISH QUART. There are exceptions, I keep hearing about this woman over the ditch who does well in tournaments and seems well-liked, but my experience with Polish Sabre Guys has mostly been like having Linux guys in your DMs, if they thought Linux was a lost 19th-century operating system for difference engines that would let you hack the Pentagon and they're describing 50% Kali and 50% space magic.
I cannot stress enough that this is coming third-hand from a book that references a man who was doing a bunch of nationalist mythmaking in an occupied nation. A man who witnessed two massacres of Polish civilians by his occupiers, who seems from his own accounts and the accounts of his family members to be deeply traumatised by it. A man who – maybe, understandably – retreated into a colourful and fanciful past to salve the horrors of the present. A book he never even released, for reasons we may never know. He was not a bad man, not a bad fencer, by somebody whose treatise should be treated with a skeptical eye, to separate the practical from the mythical.
People never stop being people. Michał Starzewski led a fascinating life, and it led to a fascinating document. To take this single source and take it entirely at face value is not doing our due diligence: if HEMA is half fighting and half history, we fail at the history half of the equation when we refuse to take documents in context, to understand the social, cultural and economic forces that lead to the creation of these texts, to understand them not as objective accounts but as works created by people.
Oh fuck next month is about George Silver isn't it.
