In a drawing executed in the style of the 1470s or 1480s, two pairs of horsemen clad in the elegant plate armor of the late-fifteenth century charge into combat with swords and maces raised (fig. 30). In the corner of the page, a pair of wrestlers grapple, each assuming a wide-legged stance to brace himself against his rival. In another drawing, likely created during the last decade of the fifteenth century, a knight encased in meticulously depicted armor straddles his opponent, pinning him to the ground (fig. 31). The defeated man's sword lies beneath his body, and he looks upward toward the victor's weapon, poised to deliver a final strike through the unfortunate man's open visor.

These two bellicose images belong to a group of three fifteenth-century drawings that were inserted between the first and second quires of the Thun album, likely during its compilation in the first decades of the seventeenth century. While drawings on paper manufactured in the 1530s or 1540s form the surrounding leaves, these three images appear on paper without discernible watermarks. However, their styles suggest that the drawings, each executed by a different hand, date to the second half of the fifteenth century. As the oldest works of art to be included in the album, they predate the images that surround them by up to five decades. Nonetheless they represent pictorial and literary genres that resonate through the album's collection of later drawings. The first and third images in the album's group of fifteenth-century drawings derive their imagery from martial treatises known as Fechtbücher (fight or fencing books) in the German-speaking lands. This genre combined didactic frameworks for communicating information related to martial skill, military science, and chivalric behavior. Fight books and literature that included martial knowledge, such as mirrors for knights, household compendia, or masters of arms’ books, were ubiquitous in the circles that created and viewed drawings like those collected in the Thun album. Because of this ubiquity, consideration of fight books helps to show how the visual and textual traditions that shaped the Thun album drawings imbued their depicted armored bodies with meanings familiar to their audiences. Through this, the album's fifteenth-century drawings became capable of functioning as mnemonic prompts that could incite their viewers’ recollections of martial knowledge.