This habit of living far beyond his means for decades exhausted his family's wealth, eventually leading him to sell the Latin version of his fencing manuscript (netting the princely sum of 800 florins) and finally to begin embezzling money from the Augsburg city coffers. Mair not only spent incredible sums of money on his fencing interests, but generally lead a lavish lifestyle and maintained his political influence with expensive parties and other entertainments for the burghers and patricians of Augsburg. He also used several printed books as source material for his compendia, and presumably owned copies, including Der Allten Fechter gründtliche Kunst (printed by Christian Egenolff), Opera Nova by Achille Marozzo, and Ringer Kunst by Fabian von Auerswald. 82 - The expanded and finished version of Antonius Rast's fencing notes.
Perhaps most significant of all of his acquisitions was the partially-completed treatise of Antonius Rast, a Master of the Long Sword and three-time Captain of the Marxbrüder fencing guild. 10825/10826) incorporated both languages.īeginning in the 1540s, Mair began purchasing older fencing manuscripts, some from fellow collector Lienhart Sollinger (a Freifechter who lived in Augsburg for many years) and others from auctions.
393) in New Latin, and the rougher third version ( Cod. Ultimately, three copies of this compendium were produced, each more extensive than the last the first ( MSS Dresden C.93/C.94) was written in Early New High German, the second and most artistically ambitious ( Cod.icon. This project was extraordinarily expensive and took at least four years to complete. He retained the workshop of Jörg Breu the Younger to create the illustrations for the text, and hired two Augsburg fencers to pose for the illustrations. Thus, some time in the latter part of the 1540s he commissioned what would become the most extensive compendium of German fencing treatises ever made, a massive two-volume manuscript compiling virtually every fencing treatise he could access. Where Meyer sought to update the traditional fencing systems and apply them to contemporary weapons of war and defense, Mair was more interested in preserving historical teachings intact. Like his contemporary Joachim Meyer, Mair believed that the Medieval martial arts were being forgotten, and he saw this as a tragedy, idealizing the arts of fencing as a civilizing and character-building influence on men. He was also an avid collector of fencing treatises and other literature on military history. Mair's martial background is unknown, but as a citizen of a free city he would have had military obligations whenever the city went to war, and as a member of a patrician family he likely served in the cavalry. He began his civil service as a secretary to the Augsburg City Council by 1541, Mair was the city treasurer, and in 1545 he also took on the office of Master of Rations. In his youth, he likely received training in fencing and grappling from the masters of Augsburg fencing guild, and early on developed a deep fascination with fencing treatises. He was born in 1517 to a wealthy and influential Augsburg patrician family. Paulus Hector Mair (Paul Hektor Mayr, Meyer 1517 – 1579) was a 16th century German aristocrat, civil servant, and fencer.
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