“Prendelli a braccia e abattergli de’ cavagli”. Quando i cavalieri venivano alle mani

Abstract

Chronicles and literary tales attest with a certain abundance throughout the Middle Ages that, both in tournaments and in the course of real wars, the knights used to fight each other not only with spear and sword, but also “by arms”, a way to fight that historiography simply tends to ignore and misinterpret as a manifestation of irrational warrior rage. On the contrary, as the treaties of chivalry show, it was a widely practiced and codified fighting technique, the result of careful preparation and special training for daring men who sometimes tended simply to unseat and kill an enemy or to capture him alive with the horse, running in any case the risk of falling with him and being run over by the hooves of his own and that of others’ mount.