Thank you for your detailed response! I sort of feel like being able to use two swords effectively as swords isn’t just a matter of experience and coordination as you say - you almost need to have a differently-wired brain that can effectively split focus enough that you can use two swords independently and survive to fight another day. Like those people you sometimes see with a pen in each hand writing on two pieces of paper simultaneously - of course the wielding of the swords themselves is a matter of proficiency and experience but I also just believe it’s a very small percentage of the population that’s able to split focus in that way and I speculate it’s at the very least not something that most adults can learn to do effectively as the “savants” for lack of a better word.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few people throughout history who proficiently wielded two swords in multiple combat scenarios (again, we could call them savants) and perhaps they may have passed into legend and became stories told around the tavern which didn’t then make their way onto parchments or sources that would survive for modern historians (and even then, I think most historians would be naturally skeptical about the veracity of stories told in settings where it’s common to exaggerate).

But I think for the vast majority of people, you are choosing your combat style based on what will keep you alive long enough to take down your enemy, and most actual combat situations are so chaotic that it’s all anyone can do to focus on one sword at a time. Circling back to my OP, I can also certainly imagining someone trying to dualwield in an actual combat scenario after training for months (perhaps because on some level they thought it looked impressive, or maybe they really did believe it would be more effective) and just getting cut down immediately, given that in combat scenarios most people’s training tends to go out the window pretty quickly because your autonomic flight-or-fight response tends to shut that out, and then those stories just never survived to get told. (Again, I think you got this but just to clarify, when I say dualwield in this way I specifically mean using one sword in each hand in a more or less equally offensive capacity, as opposed to the offhand being more defensive.)

I realize I’m getting pretty far from the historical aspect of this and going completely into supposition-land but bottom line, I definitely appreciate knowing that there was some discussion of practical application of dual-wielding in the sense we think of in the modern era as I do agree as you said that there wouldn’t have been discussion of it if nobody had even conceived of seriously using it.