Fabris’ German Evangelist: Johann Joachim Hynitzsch

— by J. Christoph Amberger, 7/12/25

Johann Joachim Hynitzsch is a bit of a tragic figure: A young, intelligent man, full of promise, well respected, good at what he was doing—and a fellow jurist to boot!—whose carefully scripted life trajectory was derailed overnight. His own fault, to be sure—he didn’t have to beat up that freshman at Jena… just at the time when this kind of thing was particularly frowned upon.

By chance, and perhaps by the intervention of the Kreussler clan, he ended up in Leipzig, three months before the death of the ailing Heinrich von und zum Velde, who took him in and entrusted the young verkrachte Jurist with his knowledge of the Fabris method, which he had studied under the master himself at Padua just weeks before Fabris’ own death.

The direct line of transmission c. 1580 to 1713:
Hynitzsch, Velde and Salvator Fabris, having a good laugh at the author.

After being the protegé of the Nordhausen administrative caste at Wittenberg and Jena, Hynitzsch ended up a self-made man, earning an honest living as a Exercitienmeister and later, Stadtleutnant of his adopted home town of Leipzig.

Like Köppe and Velde, he is an Academic Fencer in the truest sense of the term: A lifelong student who thought and wrote in the intellectual patterns of academia, and who was attracted by the science of the sword.

And like Köppe and Velde, the markers of his biography hide in the Matrikel of universities, in slightly pompous poems and well-wishes printed in the dissertations of his friends, and—in his case—a stack of unexplored documents touching on events in his later life. There is a frustrating void of 5 formative years, when he, after Velde’s death, traveled “the Northern countries”, probably learning the trade of a master in the Kriegs-Exercitien.

Hynitzsch’s contribution to the history of German thrust fencing is monumental: He spent 15 years of his life and a considerable part of his sparse income on re-creating Fabris 1606 Scienza with a side-by-side translation into German—despite his reasonable expectation to not earn a penny on it.

I haven’t spent 15 years on reconstructing Hynitzsch biography—only 3 so far. Over time, I’ve started to feel some kinship with him, as this website by now also reflects over 15 years of an obsession with fencing. When reading his texts, I can almost hear his slight Thuringian inflections (much different from the pure “kaffeesächsisch” dialect at Leipzig, which I still associate with Walter Ulbricht and the dour, grey-uniformed East German border guards of the late and unlamented German Democratic Republic.)

I have written up my preliminary findings in a separate small report, which of course is yours for the clicking!

On July 12, 2025 Hynitzsch would have turned 387. I’m not one to light a candle, so here is my hat tip to Johann Joachim Hynitzsch:

Click the image to get the .pdf.