Philippo Vadi’s (1482-7) is hardly the only fencing text produced in Italy. In his own words, he claims to have learnt from a wide variety of fencing masters from different places, so it is unsurprising that we can find links in his work to both the earlier Fiore de’i Liberi (early 1400s), and the contemporary and later Bolognese sources (particularly: Anonimo Bolognese 1510s, Antonio Manciolino 1531, Angelo Viggiani 1571, and Giovanni Dall’Agochie 1572). One concept that is central to Vadi as well as the Bolognese masters (but not Fiore) is the notion of “Tempo”, which I have discussed already at length in a previous blog post (Vadi’s Mezzo Tempo).

One key feature of “tempo” is the idea that it represents not only an action, but also the appropriate moment in which to perform an action or strike. This appears in both Vadi and the later Bolognese. Dall’Agochie provides the clearest explanation of this idea that I have seen, giving us a list of five tempo that are the safest moments to attempt to strike your opponent. Both the idea that a “tempo” is the correct moment to strike, and the specific five tempo listed by Dall’Agochie, appear in Vadi – although with much less clarity , without being explicitly linked together and all with some ambiguity.
In this post, I intend to show how Dall’Agochie’s list all appear in Vadi’s earlier work – as well as give some practical guidance on how to apply them all to your fencing.
Tempo: an opportunity to strike
The following quote is the one from Dall’Agochie that drives this all:
There are five ways of recognizing this tempo of attacking. The first one is that once you’ve parried your enemy’s blow, then it’s a tempo to attack. The second, when his blow has passed outside your body, that’s a tempo to follow it with the most convenient response. The third, when he raises his sword to harm you: while he raises his hand, that’s the tempo to attack. The fourth, as he injudiciously moves from one guard to go into another, before he’s fixed in that one, then it’s a tempo to harm him. The fifth and last, when the enemy is fixed in guard, and he raises or moves his forward foot in order to change pace or approach you, while he raises his foot, that’s a tempo for attacking him, because he can’t harm you as a result of being unsettled.
from Dell’Arte di Scrimia by Giovanni dall’Agocchie 1572 (Translation: Jherek Swanger)
Before we get into the 5 tempo the first question is: does Vadi use “tempo” in a similar way, to describe the correct moment to strike? Absolutely. Like all of the authors listed above, Vadi uses the word “tempo” in a number of closely linked ways, but there are several places where Tempo is clearly used to mean acting at the opportune moment, such as the following:
“With your eye on the weapon that can attack you
Chapter 3, Philippo Vadi 1482 (Translation: Jamie MacIver – all Vadi quotes from this source)
Seize both the tempo and the measure together”
“And seize the opportunity (tempo) so that it does not cost you dearly”
Chapter 10, Vadi
“then use your strikes in the correct tempo”
Chapter 13, Vadi
While elsewhere Vadi also uses tempo to describe an action, and the nature of that action, here clearly it is used to talk about the opportunity to strike created by the opponent’s action – but more on that later. With that established, lets look at the specific examples from Dall’Agochie.
1st Tempo: After a Parry
The first tempo Dall’Agochie lists is the moment after we have successfully parried: in modern terms, the classic parry-riposte fencing action. This is one of the clearest examples to look at. There are quite a lot of places in Vadi that heavily imply or rely upon this style of fencing, but nowhere is it clearer than this quote:
Know that skill always defeats natural ability,
Chapter 3, Vadi
Cover and then immediately attack,
And in wide or close [play] you will defeat strength.“
This is probably the easiest tempo to apply. A secure parry will always end up with the situation that the original defender’s sword is inside their opponents (if not, they would have been struck) and so there should be a clear, direct line of attack – although of course many opponents might be already starting their next strike regardless of an incoming counter attack, which can cause problems for both fencers. Cautious fencers will also be on the look out for your counter and prepared to defend against it. In either of these cases, you would have now entered what Vadi refers to as “mezza spada” (middle sword/middle play), although that is a topic for another post.
2nd Tempo: After the sword has passed you
The second tempo Dall’Agochie give us is less clear in both sources. Dall’Agochie describes this as “when his blow has passed outside your body, that’s a tempo to follow it with the most convenient response”. For me, this example is when a strike form your opponent has been attempted but has missed – usually because you voided (i.e. moved backwards out of measure) to avoid being struck and the sword has continued on its path. It’s important to note that the tempo is “after the sword as passed you” and not “after you have voided a blow” – a skilled fencer on seeing you retreat may pull their sword short and leave it with point on line. In this situation, although you may have voided the blow successfully, there is no safe tempo to strike back.
The presence of this tempo in Vadi is more ambiguous, as instead of telling us to strike in this moment, he warns us that this is a dangerous moment where we might be struck. While not as clear cut, this is still an instance where clearly the action we have performed is giving an opportunity to our opponent:
“Your sword is lost when striking with a cut
Chapter 8, Vadi
If during the strike your point moves off-line”
This tempo is harder to apply than the first, as it requires much more precise management and judgement of measure. If you are too far away from your opponent when it happens, you may not be close enough to strike within the relatively narrow window of opportunity created by this tempo – and if you are too close, then probably they just hit you in the face. Taller fencers have a much easier time performing this tempo, as they can be out of reach for their opponent while remaining comfortably within their own reach – although it is perfectly possible to use this against a taller fencer with quick footwork and reaction times.
3rd Tempo: When they raise their sword to strike
The third tempo is to strike in the moment the opponent “raises their sword to harm you”. This needs a bit of a unpicking, as it isn’t every time a person strikes at you. A quick, direct attack where the sword moves directly towards you does not create this tempo. This tempo can be created in a few ways. For example, newer fencers can often created it accidentally by moving their sword unnecessarily before striking – for example, pulling their sword back or “telegraphing” their blow. However, skilled fencers are unlikely to do this: against these, it is more common that they have been forced to move their sword because your own is in the way of a direct line of attack, and they need to move it before striking to gain a suitable angle of attack. Vadi refers to this situation as “using your sword like a great shield”, and it is also described in Viggiani as having “advantage in guard”.
This appears in Vadi in the discussion on how to enter to “mezza spada” (literally: middle sword, but translated below as middle play – again more on that in a different article):
“When you wish to enter to middle play
Vadi, Chapter 10
As your partner lifts their sword
Decide not to stay at bay
And seize the tempo so that it does not cost you dearly“
Here, the motion of lifting a sword to strike is shown as creating an opportunity for you to act. It is not specified in the text whether at this moment you enter mezza spada by parrying the blow or striking: either are perfectly valid options in the situation and I think the lack of specific advice is intentional, as you should use whichever suits your situation.
4th Tempo: Injudiciously Changing Guard
The 4th tempo is when your opponent is changing guard unnecessarily – and by extension, larger than is necessary. With this tempo, the nature of the guard change matters a lot – a move for instance from a guard high and on the right, to one low and on the left, creates a much bigger opportunity than a small shift of the sword from two closely related guards. It is this last part that Vadi warns us against primarily, although he never explicitly says to attack if someone does this badly:
Beware that your sword never remains
Vadi, Chapter 16
Far away from you, either when in guard or while striking
Vadi also talks about provoking this tempo by doing actions that will make an opponent change guard. The first in discussing the use of the thrust:
Often I [the thrust] force the guards to move
Vadi, Chapter 7
When someone throws me to confront them
And the second in the discussion of a feint leading to an un-needed parry attempt, which is simply an unnecessary guard change:
From one side you strike
Vadi, Chapter 13
Your feint goes to the other
And as their parry loses its way
You can hammer to another target
The only time Vadi explicitly tells us to strike in this moment is with the feint. Dall’Agochie’s version seems to be more about moving guard positions rather than to defend, but the situation is fundamentally the same: they have moved unnecessarily from one guard to another, and that gives an opportunity to strike them. Owen Hahn (my fellow LHFC instructor) will often tell students that in this situation the best place to strike is to where the sword used to be before it moved – the sword will be moving away from there, making it hard for the opponent to recover in time to cover against the strike. This is pretty solid advice, although of course not the only option you have.
5th Tempo: As they lift their foot
The 5th and last tempo is when the opponent steps into your measure. As they are mid step, they will be off balance and it will make it harder for them to react to your strike. As with everything, the bigger their step, the more true this is.
This last requires some creative interpretation of a very difficult passage to find in: I have inserted measure and tempo into it, but they are not explicit in the original. This passage in particular is of of a handful of parts of Vadi that has an extremely high degree of variation between the various translators – it is badly written and unclear in the original.
And when you have found [the correct measure]
As I say here, do not lose [the tempo]:When you see that they move their sword,
Vadi, Chapter 3
Or they make too large a step
Or you retreat, or they seek to close in.
The above passage immediately follows Vadi’s advice to match your steps with your opponent. Why do I think this is about measure and tempo? Well, as you can see the list at the end has more overlap with Dall’Agochie’s list than just the opponent making a step. Throughout Vadi’s work, he returns time and time again to the idea that measure and tempo are linked. The advice to match steps before seems clearly to be about managing measure, and if you do this badly you will lose the tempo to strike in exactly the situations listed. I cannot render another intelligible piece of advice out of this passage – although I will fully accept that this requires a degree of interpretation in my translation that a lot of HEMA practitioners are (incorrectly in my mind) averse to.
Short Tempo
The final part of Vadi that makes me even more certain that he is thinking about Tempo in a very similar way to Dall’Agochie is his repeated advice to use shorter, smaller motions when we act:
...all large tempo will fail
Vadi, Chapter 10
…attack with shorter tempo
Vadi, Chapter 10
As doing so will keep you safe
Vadi, Chapter 16
As your sword takes a shorter path
As I hinted at in the sections above, in all cases the opportunity created by an action is a matter of degree: a small guard change, a small step, a smooth strike without pulling back, pulling your cut short or even quickly recovering after a strike are all examples where a smaller action reduces the tempo given to your opponent. Time and again Vadi tells us that larger actions are more likely to fail and are less safe for us to perform. Why? Quite simply, because the tempo created by a larger action is greater, so our opponent is more likely to be able to exploit it.
Conclusions
As discussed, there is clear – although not entirely unambiguous – evidence that Vadi’s use of tempo has strong links to Dall’Agochie’s, and that all of Dall’Agochie’s five tempo to strike appear in some way in Vadi’s much earlier work. While we have no way of knowing any biographical details that link the two authors together, the stylistic links between the two are strong and this is interesting in its own right – and makes it useful to use Dall’Agochie’s description to support our fencing within Vadi’s system.
The inspiration for this article was me demonstrating just that, in my latest “Vadi: By the Source” video. This is a series of videos I’ve been publishing on YouTube ,where I pair quotes from Vadi with footage from my tournament and sparring, in order to demonstrate the principles from Vadi with some actual fencing. The latest video diverges from my usual format, as I use a quote from Dall’Agochie rather than Vadi – I’m sure you can agree the Vadi quotes would have been far less clear.
An interesting feature of the video, is that all of my opponents in it happen to be the silver medalist from the event in question. The use of tempo to help us strike safely is something that becomes more important the more skilled your opponent is: against newer fencers, speed and surprise can usually carry the day even if you attack without considering them. Against skilled fencers, as Vadi and Dall’Agochie agree, the way to stay safe is to strike when you have the right opportunity to do so.
If you want to watch the video you can find it here:
To watch the series from the beginning, you go here instead: