What is a rapier, anyway?
Well, it's complicated...
“A rapier is the sword used in swashbuckling movies, right? It’s what the Three Musketeers used, and Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“Rapiers are the really decorative swords you find in museums around the world, but mostly in Europe, yeah?”
Well, maybe? The word ‘rapier’ can be a loaded term with historical fencing experts.
The Dictionary Box on Google says a rapier is:
a thin, light sharp-pointed sword used for thrusting.
It goes on to claim the word comes from the early 16th century: from French rapière, from râpe ‘rasp, grater’ (because the perforated hilt resembles a rasp or grater).
Many swords we know as rapiers weigh about the same as earlier medieval swords, including some long swords - 2.5 to 3 lbs. So I wouldn’t necessarily call them light, relatively speaking. And the word ‘rapier’ was being used well before the inclusion of the perforated steel plates found on some early 17th century swords. So that’s certainly an inaccurate claim.
The history of the word ‘rapier’
The word ‘rapier’ is indeed a loan from Middle French ‘espee rapiere’, first recorded in 1474.1 The word ‘rapiere’ itself is defined in 14th and 15th century French as:
…a poking implement, a poker2
And ‘espee’ is the Old French3 word for sword. This definition goes back to at least the 14th century, and is reportedly inherited from the Latin spatha, which was borrowed from Ancient Greek σπάθη (spáthē).
So when you combine the two you get to the end result that “espee rapiere” meant “poking sword.”
Unfortunately, with the growth across Europe of a middle class that had the means to buy and wear swords, the English and possibly Germans tended to muddle the word 'rapier' by using it to describe any fashionable sword that gentlemen wore, regardless of the intended use of that sword’s blade. Evidence shows they tied the word not to the capabilities of the blade, but to the increasingly complex and decorative hilt, which was often worn more as jewelry by those who could afford it than for self-defense.
For example, when one I.G. translated Giacomo Di Grassi’s his true Arte of Defence into English, he wrote in “An Advertisement to the curteous reader”:
I thought good to advertise thee that in some places of this booke by reason of the equivocation of certaine Italian wordes, the weapons may doubtfully be construed in English. Therefore sometimes fynding this worde Sworde generally used, I take it to have beene the better translated, if in steede thereof the Rapier had beene inserted: a weapon more usuall for Gentlemens wearing, and fittest for causes of offence and defence
But the blades attached to those hilts that Gentlemen wore varied - sometimes widely (pun intended). Meaning they would likely have different dynamics from one another and be optimized for different tactics. So while one sword with a two-ring swept hilt might be very long and optimized primarily for thrusts, another with the same hilt would be far shorter and built for both the cut and the thrust.
It’s not an Italian word
To confuse matters more, the Italian authors of the 16th and early 17th centuries didn’t use any form of the word ‘rapier’ in their manuals. They referred generally to the spada, or sword. They sometimes specified whether a sword was sharp,4 used for play,5 or carried as a sidearm.6 But they did not generally separate in their renaissance lexicon a sword designed mainly for cutting from one meant mainly for thrusting.7
But some 17th century German works did delineate between “Stoßfechten” and “Hiebfechten” - thrust-fencing and cut-fencing respectively.
The system being described in the northern Italian manuals of the early 17th century is a system of defense for when you’re using a sword that is generally long, thin, and sharp, constructed much more for thrusting than for cutting.
So an accurate approach, perhaps, is to think about northern Italian fencing manuals as teaching a system of thrust-fencing that has a few cuts thrown in when appropriate.
And in fact, when we in the historical fencing communities refer to a rapier system, or rapier combat, we are talking about a system that uses a sword primarily, if not solely, meant for thrusting attacks.
The espada ropera theory
A.V.B. Norman writes in his book The Rapier and Small-Sword about a suggestion by one Claude Blair that the word rapier derived from the Spanish ‘espada ropera' - meaning “sword of the robe,” or dress/civilian sword. He wrote:
The phrase 'espada ropera' is presumably the origin of the French 'epee rapiere' which first appears in 1474.8
Norman documents ‘espada ropera’ back to 1468, and suggests that is where the French epee rapier originated, presumably because it appears 6 years later in France. He also points to the definition of ‘la rapiere’ as “the spannyshe sworde” in Giles Duwes’ An Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce, and to speake Frenche trewly, published in London in the 1530s, and claims that definition confirms the Spanish connection (by ‘connection’ he presumably meant ‘origin’).
This argument has gained traction over the years to the point that many take it as gospel, but seems less likely when contrasted with the actual French meaning of raspiere that goes back at least as far as the 13th c. In other words it seems to me a much easier progression to go from the word ‘raspiere’ which meant “a poking instrument” to ‘epee rapiere’ than to go from ‘espada ropera’ which meant “dress sword” to ‘epee rapier’. Especially since the word ‘rapier’ itself wasn’t used in Spain.
And then there’s Sydney Anglo’s discussion. Dr. Sydney Anglo, in his book The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, dedicates several pages to the subject of ‘What was a rapier?’ But in the end Dr. Anglo really just documents what I’ve written above and more, and never really tries to track down the most plausible etymology.9 It’s a good read, though, for any who want more details on the confusion surrounding the word ‘rapier’.
Merriam-Webster FTW
The word experts at Merriam-Webster claim a rapier is:
…a straight 2-edged sword with a narrow pointed blade.10
I think Mirriam-Webster gets closest to a good general-use definition, here. And really, in the end, it’s almost always a good idea to go with Merriam-Webster when it comes to the modern usage of any words, right?
Next up:
Northern Italian Postures, Part 1: The primary postures of Salvatore Fabris (Paid subscribers)
How to hold the rapier (All subscribers)
1474 espee rapiere (Arch., JJ 195, pièce 1155 ds Gdf.); 1485 rapiere (Archives du Nord, B 1703, f o100 ds IGLF), https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/rapi%C3%A8re.
Harper Douglas, “Etymology of rapier,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed June 12, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/rapier; see also “Rapier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rapier. Accessed 12 Jun. 2023. (“The word itself, which we borrowed in the 16th century, is from Middle French rapiere.”)
Old French was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th and the mid-14th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French)
Spada da filo - translated into English as ‘edge sword’; see Florio's 1598 Italian/English Dictionary: A WORLD of Words: “Filo, …the edge of any knife or weapon.”
Spada da gioco - translated into English as ‘game sword’, ‘play sword’, or ‘sport sword’; see Florio's 1598 Italian/English Dictionary: A WORLD of Words: “Gioco, a game, a play, a sport…”
Spada da lato - translated into English as ‘broad sword’, ‘wide sword’, or ‘side sword’; see Florio's 1598 Italian/English Dictionary: A WORLD of Words: “Lato, broad, ample, large, bigge, great, wide, spacious. Also a side.”
Note that in the middle of the 17th century, the Italians started referring to a spada da lato striscia - which roughly translates into a long straight thin sword sidearm.
Norman, and C M Barne. 2009. The Rapier and Small-Sword, 1460-1820. Huntingdon, England: Ken Trotman.
Anglo, Sydney. “What Was a Rapier?” The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, Yale University Press, New Haven (Conn.), 2000.
“Definition of RAPIER.” n.d. Www.merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rapier.
Very nice summary of the etymological debate, thanks for sharing it!
I never payed attention to Spada da Lato a Striscia. But this is a term that I was actually looking for (I think stripe-sword would work in English). It can separate the wider blade sideswords (used in the Bolognese tradition of cut-fencing) from the narrow blade sideswords I see a lot in museums (better for thrust-fencing systems of Agrippa, di Grassi or Palladini). I think this would reserve the term of rapier for later systems (Capoferro, Fabris and all) in modern vernacular.