Author Spotlight: Jürg Gassmann
In this 'Author Spotlight', we feature a scholar who recently contributed a centerfold article to MWCC.17 - Jürg Gassmann, "Fighting on horseback: Cavalry organisation, training, and tactics," 26-33.
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I have always enjoyed history, and it is a fascination I have inflicted on our two sons. My interest in and involvement with horses is more recent. I did not grow up with horses; my wife did. Her grandfather had owned a farm near Pawnee Rock, Kansas, beside the historic Sante Fe Trail. As a child she would spend weekends and long summer holidays there, riding around the plains. When we were living in the US, we had an opportunity to keep a few horses. My wife wanted to find the kinds of horses her grandfather had kept, and finally found them – they were Spanish Mustangs.
The breed has a fascinating history; they are the direct descendants of the horses the Spanish brought to the New World five hundred years ago. The Native American peoples adopted them and developed their own breeds. Though small by modern European standards, they are strong, agile, as well as – luckily and sometimes frustratingly – inventive and intelligent. Today they are endangered. We became interested in this Baroque breed’s history both before they came to the New World and since.
The more we looked into the history of the medieval horse, the more the received wisdom did not add up. My legal training kicked in, telling me not to rely on the interpretations, but to go to the sources. And as I dug into the footnotes, the sources quoted often did not actually support the propositions advanced – advanced by historians who were eminent but obviously had not dealt with actual horses. I eventually wrote up my findings for publication in the open-access Acta Periodica Duellatorum. I also participated in the horse history stream at the International Medieval Congress, initiated by Anastasija Ropa and Timothy Dawson, also authors in this issue.
Closer to home, my sons began developing a ruleset for tabletop gaming, for Renaissance era skirmish campaigns. I was not directly involved, it was their project, but the conundrums they were trying to solve were the subject of dinner table conversation and during sometimes long car drives. Their aim was to create a ruleset where gameplay would reproduce the episodes described in the stories of Pietro Monte, Wilwolt von Schaumberg, Benvenuto Cellini, or Jean Le Maingre, known as Boucicaut. They combined their reading of the sources with our practical experience with our horses and our study of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), where both of them acquired much greater mastery than I ever did. Judging from the reactions, they succeeded in the goals. Force of Virtue (the name and the gameplay concepts are obviously derived from Fiore de’ Liberi’s early fifteenth century fencing treatise) is an attractive and eminently playable ruleset that integrates infantry, cavalry, and sieges.
