European fighting arts of the pre-Baroque era. No modern school of fencing anywhere retained connections back to Medieval and Renaissance close-combat combat skills nor preserved any authentic instructional methods of their techniques.

The whole process of being taught by a teacher who comes from a "line" of teachers is meaningless unless there is some preserved core skill-set of collected knowledge that was retained unchanged and transmitted unbroken from instructor to instructor along the way. For the martial arts of the Renaissance, we know this was not the case. Virtually nothing survived the generations to be retained and passed on by later fencing masters using wholly different tools and methods for far narrower conditions of self-defense. It is one thing today to construct a new curriculum of martial skills basedat the time known differently, they would surely have spoken up to correct their mistaken peers. Had any of them had a better conception of the true nature of Medieval and Renaissance fighting arts and close-combat skills, they would have exposed the mistakes and myths then being perpetuated, if not to reveal their superior knowledge then simply to give proper credit to their own heritage. That none are documented as having stepped forward to do so, but instead recorded as largely regurgitating the same general consensus errors, tells us great deal about how much had been forgotten and lost. This fact alone exposes the lie of there having been modern era fencing masters still wise to the lost methods of earlier European martial arts. They could not provide