By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The two teams met on a plain outside Madrid, watched by the warring regiments and their entire retinue—some ten thousand men, women, and children. The first Italian master up was Giacomo Ferrari, some six feet tall, a fully qualified master and veteran of the wars. His opponent was Jean-Louis. The Italian attacked. Jean-Louis parried, held the blade to avoid a remise, then riposted through his opponent’s shoulder, leaving him dying. According to the rules of the engagement, he had to remain on the field until he was defeated, so after two minutes’ rest he was confronted by his second adversary. After a single action, a second victim. And so it went, man after man, until thirteen Italians had been either killed or badly wounded. Jean-Louis, his blood up if not overflowing, wanted to fight on, but representatives from both regiments managed to restrain him, and eventually it was agreed that the two remaining swordsmen, by now quaking, would not be forced to follow their unhappy comrades. “Vive Jean-Louis! Vive le 32ième!” rose the cry. “Vive le 1er!” Jean-Louis shouted back. “We are all one and the same family. Vive l’Armée!”

  Jean-Louis was twenty-eight years old at this, his most famous encounter. His reputation spread throughout France. He refused a commission and was happy to retire to Metz, where he opened a fencing school, which in 1830 he moved to Montpellier, teaching there until his death in 1865. Earlier that year, aged eighty, he had lost his eyesight, but he continued to teach, doing everything by touch. The whole city turned out for his funeral.

  * Voltaire’s fencing days were not entirely wasted. Seven years before, while visiting her father, he had met a fifteen-year-old girl, Emilie de Breteuil, in her Paris apartment, with seventeen rooms and thirty servants. Emilie was a tomboy and thought “difficult.” According to the science writer David Bodanis, she “had long black hair and a look of perpetual startled innocence, and although most other debutante types wanted nothing more than to use their looks to get a husband, Emilie was reading Descartes’ analytic geometry, and wanted potential suitors to keep their distance.”2 Her parents, worried she might grow up clumsy, paid for her to have fencing lessons, and she became good enough to take on Jacques de Brun, the head of the king’s bodyguard detail, in a public contest, a performance that helped keep her many unwanted suitors at bay. At nineteen, Emilie made a marriage of convenience with a wealthy soldier named du Châtelet, then thirty, and continued her research in physics and mathematics. She also found time to translate Aristotle and Virgil, as well as to take several lovers. In 1733, eight years after Voltaire’s encounter with Rohan, he met Emilie at the opera, and the two became lovers, soul mates, and fellow researchers. Emilie’s work on the nature of energy was the most advanced of her time. When in 1749 she died aged forty from a late pregnancy, Voltaire wrote, “I have lost the half of myself—a soul for which mine was made.”

  I like to think that, had Emilie survived, she and Voltaire might have invented fencing’s electric box two centuries ahead of time.

  † Employing seconds became widespread in the second half of the sixteenth century. The most notorious duel of that period was the “duel des mignons” of 1578, in which six of Henri III’s favorites killed each other. “Once a second had killed his man,” François Billacois tells us, “or put him out of action, he would go to the aid of the duelist he was seconding.”3

  ‡ In 1670 Molière, the leading court dramatist, was ordered by Louis XIV to produce a “divertimento,” a comedy-ballet with music and dancing. The result was Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in which an aspiring middle-class Frenchman struggles to ape his alleged betters. To invest himself with the appropriate affectation of nobility, he retains four teachers—of music, dancing, fencing, and philosophy. Each presents the case for the importance of his art, discoursing on the virtues of harmony, grace, verbal dexterity, and swordsmanship. To a modern ear, swordplay hardly seems to be given much of a recommendation, but Molière’s fencing master was propounding radical theories: “As I proved the other day with demonstrative logic, it’s impossible to be hit if you simply divert your opponent’s blade from the line of your body. You do that with a simple twist of the wrist, either inward or outward.”

  During the fencing master’s argument, Molière satirically uses the expression “mettre flamberge au vent” (“to put Flamberge to the wind”) to describe the act of drawing a smallsword with a grand flourish, as if it were the great Flamberge—the other name of the mighty Durendal in The Song of Roland. Two centuries on, in his history of swordplay, Egerton Castle simply renamed this serrated weapon the “Flamberge”—and so it has been called ever since.

  § Richard Burton’s archive has no fewer than thirty pages on the salute, including the handwritten note “Perhaps the most significant and certainly the most graceful part of the fencing lesson.… The salute proves the foilsman’s method and quality. Nothing can be more unsightly than a salute stiffly or awkwardly, hurriedly or lazily executed; and it is especially unpleasant to see one of the swordsmen watching the actions of his opponent so as to follow them as best he can.”10

  ‖ In 1908 the French extended the target to include the lines of the groin and the upper sword arm from shoulder to elbow. After the Antwerp Games of 1920 the upper arm was excluded. For women, the target remained at a line drawn across the top of the hips until 1964, when it was finally made the same as the men’s.

  a The full title is L’Ecole des armes avec l’explication générale des principles attitudes et positions concernant l’escrime. The famous writer Denis Diderot contributed illustrations, but these were considered too innovative and contrary to French Academy teaching, and every printer the two men approached refused to touch them. Eventually Diderot had to go to Livorno to have them printed. There is a ghastly story attached to the book’s production: Some of the plates were reportedly engraved by a man condemned to death, who was allowed a respite to finish them for the benefit of his wife and children. Once the work was done, he was hanged.16

  b According to the nineteenth-century historian Arsène Vigeant, there is another, less romantic version: mulatto births in the French colonies were generally recorded by a single name. Sometimes on the baptismal certificate the full name of the patron saint after which a child was named would be written down, hence “Saint-Georges” rather than plain “Georges.”27

  c During Napoleon’s time duelists took to wearing a coat of mail under their shirts, sometimes painted flesh color (known as “supersticerie”). To combat the practice, it soon became customary to fight naked to the waist. The Duke of Wellington, among others, sometimes wore armor under his tunic during battle. It is odd that he never learned to fence—his one duel was with pistols—despite having attended military school in France.

  New Japanese blades were tested on the corpses of criminals. The blindfolded figure in this seventeenth-century drawing suggests that it was not always a requirement that the perpetrator be dead before testing began. (illustration credit p2)

  The name of the sword sayd the lady is Excalibur, that is as muche to say it cuts stele.

  —SIR THOMAS MALORY, Le Morte D’Arthur, 1485

  Nothing is more discouraging for a soldier than to find, when he has dealt his adversary a mighty blow with the sword, that the blade twists or that the hilt comes off in his hand.

  —The Daily Telegraph, OCTOBER 8, 1895

  MY FATHER’S FAMILY WORKED IN METAL—COPPER, ZINC, aluminum, bronze, and other alloys—for more than two hundred years. The firm that became A. Cohen and Co. was founded by my great-great-great-great-grandfather Aaron Cohen in 1799—the year George Washington died—and by the 1980s had foundries around the world, from Bulawayo to Barcelona. When my father, the fourth and youngest son of the company’s chairman, was a young man, he went to work on the foundry floor, supervising the men who separated the metals. They knew about his prowess as an amateur boxer and were rather proud of him, while he appreciated their skills and the danger inherent in their work.* A. Cohen and Co. is no longer a family business, nor, for that matter, a profitable one. A c
ouple of years ago I went down to its single remaining foundry, in Woolwich in southeast London. The place was a sad sight. Some of the letters above the main doorway were missing, and the sign read, all too accurately, “A C HE.” In its heyday the foundry produced 153 tons a week; now a weekly tonnage of 80 to 85 tons is acceptable. “The scrap industry is dying on its feet,” the plant manager told me as he handed me a pair of protective goggles and led me around the pitted and blackened furnaces.

  I stood by, mesmerized, as foster copper was cast into little balls of metal—“shot”—as the men, fewer than a dozen in number, injected liquid phosphorus into molten copper at a heat of 1,580 to 1,620 degrees Fahrenheit—demanding work, as phosphorus is spontaneously combustible, and dirty, too, with waste shards of metal of all shapes and sizes, dust, and grime covering the factory floor. But as the furnace roared and the orange-yellow liquid poured from one cylinder to another, I understood why metalwork has always been ascribed unearthly qualities, why alchemy has seemed a magician’s talent, why even Sir Isaac Newton found “the transmuting of metals his chief design.” It recalled the fascination I have always felt when watching a roaring log or coal fire. Only this was not just conjuring shapes out of flame; it was making metals, metals that in another age would have become swords.

  THE WORD “SWORD” COMES FROM THE OLD ENGLISH SWEORD, WHICH is derived from the Indo-European root meaning “to wound.” However, what follows is not even a short history of the sword in its manifold forms but rather an inquiry into what goes into producing the finest blades and the search, through millennia, for the perfect instrument of death.

  One expert recently calculated that eighty-two different manipulations are required before a lump of metal is converted into a fencing blade, with every blade having to be fashioned by hand, the skills necessary to forge the metal alone requiring approximately fifteen years of apprenticeship.1 The exact composition of the craft alloys and the ways they are treated have always been secrets jealously guarded by blademasters, on a par with a botta segreta. The discovery of a new alloy for swordmaking would have as much effect on society (pregunpowder) as the discovery of atomic power in modern times.

  One thinks of a sword as a long strip of metal, of either iron or steel, with a handle; but the first swords were made of wood. Copper was forged as early as 5000 B.C., and smelting appears by the time of Christ. These first weapons of copper or bronze, and later those of iron, were of poor quality; none maintained an edge for long. The Greek historian Polybius recounts clashes with Gallic warriors who periodically had to pull out of the battleline to straighten their soft iron blades beneath their feet. Strong blades require a certain carbon content, a fact not grasped literally for ages.†

  A good blade must be able to hold a keen edge, yet not break or bend out of shape under a heavy blow. Unfortunately, the more intensely steel is hardened, the more brittle it becomes. Soft iron, while hard to snap, deforms easily and loses its edge. As a way out, the earliest bladesmiths laboriously hammer-welded together thin strips of steel and iron of contrasting hardnesses to form the core of the blade, then added, separately, edges of very hard steel. The core strips were braided or twisted like rope, so that, when polished, the finished blade would display patterns of light and dark that resembled spotted snakeskin (Würmbunt in German), poetically envisioned as fighting or writhing dragons and serpents. To achieve this effect, it was essential that the steel’s temperature under the hammer be carefully controlled, and the close monitoring of the metal’s passage from dark red to white hot was best undertaken at night. This skill of the dark hours reinforced the superstitious awe surrounding swordsmiths, who fashioned instruments made to take life and elevated their craft into the realm of magic. There evolved an entire mythology, stretching across the world’s cultures, in which a master swordsmith—a Wayland Smith or Voelundr or Daedalus—achieved wondrous feats.2

  In his memoirs Alexandre Dumas recalls his friend Alphonse Rabbe—“one of the most extraordinary men of our time”—who at the age of thirty tried to stab himself to death but whose hand was so unsteady that he missed his heart. Dumas seized upon the episode to write “The Old Dagger,” an essay in praise of the instrument that had, so to speak, spared his friend’s life. “Was it in the blood of a newly-killed bull that your point was buried on first coming out of the fire?” it begins. “Was it in the cold air of a narrow gorge of mountains? Was it in the syrup prepared from certain herbs, or perhaps, in holy oil?” Dumas opens one of the oddest encomiums on record: “What does this broad furrow mean which, a quarter of the length down your blade to the hilt, is pierced with a score of tiny holes like so many loopholes? Doubtless they were made so the blood could seep through.”3

  Such blade worship is not unusual. History and myth are crowded with the names of famous weapons: Ulysses’ Aor in the Iliad, Roland’s Durendal, the sword of Damocles, Tyrfing (the magic weapon that King Heidrik flings at Odin), Charlemagne’s Flamberge (“The Flame Cutter”) and Joyeuse, El Cid’s Tizona, Oliver’s Glorius, Nuada’s sword in the Grail legend, and Siegfried’s armory of special weapons, famously including Mimung, Gram, and Nothung. There are Hogni’s sword, Dainslef, wrought by dwarves, which takes a man’s life whenever drawn; the legendary sword of Samurai lore, Ama No Murakumo Tsurugi, drawn from the tail of an eight-headed dragon; and Tethra’s speaking sword. Most famous of all, there is Excalibur:

  And Arthur rode across and took it, rich

  With jewels, elfin urim in the hilt,

  Bewildering heart and eye—the blade so bright,

  That men were blinded by it—on one side,

  Graven in the oldest tongue in all this world,

  “Take me,” but turn the blade and ye shall see,

  And written in the language that ye speak yourself,

  “Cast me Away.” And sad was Arthur.…4

  In the Middle Ages, a time of intense superstitiousness, the swordsmith was believed to employ a magic compound of gold, silver, copper, and lead, a so-called Electrum Magicum, as part of his craft. Under the influence of the stars he was held to be able to impart supernatural strength to both swords and armor. As a result, a truly crafted suit of armor became so costly that only the richest of noblemen could afford one. By 1300 steel was selling at £3 a ton, five times the cost of iron.

  Throughout history culture upon culture has pursued the secret of the perfect sword, a search the more intense because swordmaking is an art with a difference: the better the craftsman, the more likely the blade’s owner is to survive. Ability is not everything. A duelist with a choice of weapons could rely on the skills and cunning of his swordmaker to obtain an unfair advantage. One armorer in Milan was said to have calibrated his tempering of steel to such a pitch of perfection that in the hands of the inexperienced the weapons would actually shiver to pieces; in those familiar with them they were “as trusty as the stoutest Toledo blade.” There were other legends: Otwit, King of Lombardy, received from Alberic, master craftsman of the dwarves, a blade so fine as to leave no mark after use. Among Arab smiths, a new blade’s quality was tested by placing it in a river, edge pointed upstream, where it was expected to cut floating leaves in half. In the seventeenth century, the great French master Liancour made “a curious suggestion, copied by all his successors, that the point of the blade should be broken to test its quality; if it be grey, it is good, if white, it should be rejected. He does not say what arguments should be used to appease the sword-cutler’s objections to this damage to his stock.”5

  THE ART OF TEMPERING MADE SUCH CITIES AS MILAN AND AUGSBURG famous, but there were four truly preeminent centers: Damascus, whose blades have been legendary since the Crusades; Toledo, where the finest Spanish swords were and still are made; Solingen, home of German steel; and Japan, whose story is the most complex of all.

  In 390 B.C. Celts from Gaul invaded Italy and sacked Rome. A contemporary noted, “They would raise their swords aloft and smile after the manner of wild boars, throwing the whole weight of
their bodies into the blow like hewers of wood or men digging with pickaxes, and again they would deliver crosswise blows aimed at no target, as if they intended to cut to pieces the entire bodies of their adversaries, armor and all.”6 Hacking weapons require blades that last, however, and those fashioned in Damascus came to lead the field. In Burton’s research boxes at the Huntington Library I came across a late-nineteenth-century article from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, “Eastern Swords and Steel,” which endorses the commonly held belief that the best curved swords were made in the East:

  From the artistic point of view nothing can be better. The cimetars [sic] of the Persian model have a beauty of form worthy of their material, the so-called Damascus steel. The Eastern preference for a curved blade was not artistic, but arose from certain practical considerations of an apparently plausible kind. The typical Oriental warrior is always a horseman, and it is easier to slash on horseback than to thrust. Then, too, a drawing cut with a curved blade gives a singularly ugly wound.… The yataghan—of Byronic associations—is a very typical Oriental weapon. It is beautiful and withal terrible to look at—a sharp-pointed blade with an edge on the inside curve. But it is the sword of a nation of butchers, good for cutting throats, but comparatively useless for purposes of honest fighting.7

  The writer does not say what “honest fighting” might be, but he never disputes the notion that Damascene swords were the best of their kind. Legends about Damascene steel abounded. It was said that before the metal was forged it was fed in small pieces to chickens, mixed up in their grain. The birds’ droppings were then collected and melted, to phosphorize the steel. Another account has it that the blades, heated before their final quenching, were cooled by plunging them through the bodies of muscular, active slaves, so that the metal was infused with their strength.