Another method often used to enliven the proceedings was to add various fantastic elements – what later generations would call scenarios. Knights swore oaths to undertake dangerous missions, vowed to abstain from this or that activity or food or dress for such and such a time until a fight could be held and honor redeemed, and the like. A popular form of combat was the pas d’armes. In it, one or more knights swore to defend a bridge or pass against all comers using either blunt weapons or sharp ones; on one occasion they did so for no fewer than six weeks. Another was the fountain of tears near which was to be found the weeping maiden. She was being held prisoner by a wicked dragon or magician and had to be rescued. Sometimes a lady had to wear a bracelet and could not enter a certain place without a knight coming to her assistance. On other occasions a knight or group of knights went in quest of the Holy Grail. Mythical beasts, unicorns above all, were often used to complete the picture. Sometimes knights defended not positions but propositions (e.g. “noe fare ladie was ever false”) much as if they were PhD candidates taking their oral exams.85 The list of possibilities, many of them taken from twelfth-century romances that described the legendary adventures of even earlier heroes, was practically endless.86 Detailed handbooks advised people how to organize tournaments, what rules to apply, and so on.
Thanks no doubt in part to the pageantry which accompanied them, tournaments retained their popularity as a spectator sport – as is proved by early prints which often show packed tribunes and people climbing roofs and even trees to watch. At a joust held at Westminster in the presence of Queen Elizabeth in 1581, so great was the throng that many people were injured and some killed. Still, the above changes, as well as the gradual spread of firearms, caused the value of tournaments as training for war to decline. Writing around 1350 Geoffroi de Charny explained that war was the greatest test of martial skills. The tournament came next, whereas the last place was occupied by the joust. The same author described jousts as “attractive to the participants and fair to see,” but they might also cause some men to neglect more serious pursuits of arms.87 Edward III himself, in founding a chivalrous order, made it clear that the way to become a member of it was by martial exploits, armes de guerre, and not by tourneying. A century or so after them Jean de Bueil in Le Jouvencel gave it as his opinion that those who engaged in “feats of arms” were risking their lives merely to prove their ability to do something that was of no use to anybody better than anybody else.88
As war and tournament went their separate ways, the latter tended to become more exclusive, socially speaking. Two processes were involved. First, armor had always been very expensive. With plate taking the place of mail and chain from the middle of the fourteenth century on, it became even more so. The carefully constructed and splendidly decorated late fifteenth-century suits originating in centers such as Milan and Nuremberg, and now on display in many museums around the world, cost a fortune and were far beyond the reach of many ordinary knights. In the end only true grandees could afford these masterpieces. This process peaked around 1530, when a decline set in. Starting with the pieces that protected their legs, slowly but surely cavalrymen discarded their suits. That, however, was too late to save the tournament.
Second, during the fifteenth century organizers increasingly tried to limit participation to true blue-bloods. Previously low-born knights and even mercenaries, provided of course they possessed the necessary equipment, had been able to attend. Even townspeople sometimes organized tournaments in which they competed against one another, which incidentally is one more proof as to just how popular they really were.89 Later, though, all these different categories of men were increasingly left out.90 Those directly responsible for this were the heralds, a class of officials who were becoming increasingly professionalized and who, like all professionals, tended to be sticklers for detail. The fenestration of arms, meaning that arms had to be hung outside one’s tent or pavilion so that contenders could deliver their challenge by knocking on them, worked in the same direction by leaving out those not entitled to a coat of arms. The two processes reinforced one another: as the cost of tourneying skyrocketed, the number of those granted entry declined. To make things worse still, victors, instead of holding the vanquished to ransom or at least taking away their horses and suits of armor, had to be content with the prizes formally handed out by the organizers. The days when one could make a fortune by going from one event to the next were over. In view of all this, the wonder is not that interest in tournaments declined – far less was written about them after 1500 than before – and eventually disappeared, but that some were still being held even during the early decades of the seventeenth century. In 1645 Sir John Evelyn watched one in Rome, although by that time it was more in the nature of a bloodless reenactment than a bona fide fight.91
Compared with the kinds of wargames we have already studied, tournaments show a number of interesting similarities and dissimilarities. Unlike the above-mentioned games of tribal societies, which were open to any adult male, tournaments were normally the exclusive province of the higher classes and tended to become even more so as time went on. Unlike single combats and combats of champions, there was no attempt, however theoretical and however futile, to use them for solving political problems connected with real-life war. It is, however, true that tournaments were often held during lulls in the latter and also that, if care was not taken, they might run out of control and escalate into real warfare; if some organizers tried to arrange things in such a way that friends would not have to fight one another, others deliberately placed well-known enemies on opposite sides. Status-wise, knights were as far removed from gladiators as anybody could be. Neither prisoners, nor slaves, nor degraded because of their choice of occupation, they represented the flower of contemporary society and always entered the lists of their own free will. As countless chronicles, romances, and chansons make clear, participating in tournaments was one of the most important and most praiseworthy things a knight, whatever his rank, could do in life. As late as 1515 the Freydal of Emperor Maximilian I, a work named after the nom de guerre he assumed when tourneying, contained no fewer than 255 carefully executed plates, all of which show the tournaments in which he had taken part. He himself went over the manuscript page by page and corrected some of the details.92
Certainly death and injury, present from the beginning, were regarded as unavoidable. Still, the real objective of the fighting was less to inflict them than to incapacitate, capture, and obtain a ransom. On the other hand, there were cases when knights released their captives in order to prove their generosity, or so the sources tell us.93 Indeed the way prisoners were treated represented one of the major differences between mock warfare and the real thing. Whereas prisoners of war were sometimes held for years, those taken in tournaments were supposed to be released when the event came to an end, usually on the same day. Early tournaments strongly resembled war and were sometimes used to recruit warriors for both licit purposes and illicit ones. However, as time went on and they were replaced first by jousts and then by tilts – by which I mean the form of combat in which the protagonists were separated by a partition – this became much less so than had initially been the case. By 1420 at the latest, the differences had grown to the point where any military training tournaments could offer had become an illusion, and at times a dangerous one at that. Later still, as the sixteenth century went on, increasingly it was not the fighting itself but the pageantry by which it was surrounded that contemporaries found most interesting.
Intended neither as preliminaries to war nor as judgments, let alone as religious services as the munera were, essentially all forms of combat collectively known as tournaments were pure entertainment, joined of course with theater of the kind Geertz has described. Whereas early on tournaments and war went hand in hand, gradually the theater tended to overshadow the fighting. Just as the gladiatorial combats had been an essential element in the process of Romanizing the Roman Empire, so in time tournaments became the foca
l point of an entire culture. As that culture waned away, to use Huizinga’s admirable phrase, so did they.
A question of honor
By the middle years of the sixteenth century single combat, combat of champions, and the judicial duel had clearly turned into anachronisms. While tournaments were still being held, they too were entering the last stages of what was to prove their final decline. However, the idea that men (hardly ever women) should defend their “honor” weapon in hand, fighting and shedding blood if necessary, remained very much alive. As is so often the case, the precise origins of the duel, a highly ritualized form of wargame that now emerged and was to remain in vogue for the next three and a half centuries, are unknown. In 1549, one historian claims, the term itself had not yet been invented.94
In essence, two interpretations are possible. The first is that duels were born out of trial by combat, now finally superseded and suppressed, and that they continued that tradition in unofficial form. The other is that they grew out of what contemporaries called rencontres, best translated as fights. At times and places when government was weak – as, in the absence of a specialized police force, it often was – the term covered all sorts of ambushes, skirmishes, and small battles waged between private individuals as a method for settling disputes. Originally they could be fought on horseback as well as on foot, by small groups of men as well as by individuals. An excellent case in point is the skirmish between the followers of the house of Capulet and that of Montague in which Tybalt and Mercutio are killed.95 Later, instead of simply drawing and fighting as in Shakespeare’s play, they started to formally challenge one another to a duel. In a way, doing so was a method of avoiding the increasingly heavy hand of government. The possibility must also be considered that both explanations are correct, and that duels actually had two parents. One was rooted in now antiquated law; the other originally existed outside it but, having evolved into a different form, came to be more or less tolerated by it. Having entered the world by the fusion of two different traditions, no wonder duels incorporated elements from both.
Formal dueling, rooted in an attempt to limit casualties by having the rencontres take place at a designated time and place, as well as defining exactly who would and who would not participate, seems to have been invented in Italy where it was known as the combattimento della mazza (mazza = staff, club, mace).96 From there it spread to Spain – at the time, much of Italy was governed from Madrid – and, probably at the hand of mercenary soldiers, to France.97 There the collapse of royal authority during the last four decades of the sixteenth century enabled it to take root. Subsequently France became the classic country of the swashbuckling swordsman, so much so that in Germany duels were known as French combat.98 At first there was no attempt to enforce what later became the outstanding characteristic of the duel, i.e. strict symmetry and obedience to the rules. Things, however, gradually changed. By 1642, when two French combatants took off their boots and put on dancing pumps instead, duels had developed from something very close to a free-for-all into what one historian calls “a graceful art defined by its rituals.”99 Some seventeenth-century observers, notably the English political scientist and satirist Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), even argued that duels grew out of the spirit of politeness that set their own age apart from all its predecessors.100
With few exceptions, most previous wargames took place with the consent of the authorities, who organized them, encouraged them, used them for their own purposes, and, in not a few cases, participated in them. Not so duels, which almost from the beginning were a thorn in those authorities’ side. England’s King James I, who wrote several treatises on the subject,101 was but one out of many rulers who tried to eradicate them. However, neither in England nor anywhere else could the ban be enforced; it has been claimed that during the reign of Henry IV (1589–1610) over 4,000 French aristocrats were killed in duels. Henry’s successor, Louis XIII (1610–43), is said to have issued no fewer than 8,000 pardons for murders associated with duels, and even this figure only covers part of his reign. His, of course, was another period when France was weakly governed. Pictures show duels being fought on a bridge across the Seine not far from the Palais Royale. Voltaire, looking back on the reign from the heights of the Enlightenment a century or so later, considered that this was when the passion for the “gothic barbarism” of dueling had become part of the national character.102
The reasons why the prohibitions did not work are not hard to find. On the one hand, monarchs could not but look at duels with a jaundiced eye. This, after all, was the age of growing absolutism. As official ideology, the growth of government, and many forms of art all testify, it was characterized by nothing so much as the royal attempts to impose order on society in general and the aristocracy in particular.103 On the other hand, rulers themselves were aristocrats. Like other blue-bloods, they owed their status and privileges to their birth. Prohibiting what was usually regarded as an aristocratic custom – in principle, only aristocrats had honor to defend – meant sawing off the branch on which they were sitting. Brantôme, the late sixteenth-century French historian and biographer, claims that King Henry III, who reigned from 1574 to 1589, loved his nobility too much to enforce the prohibitions on dueling he was always issuing.104
More specifically, aristocrats were the class from which rulers drew their officers. As long as the ancien régime lasted most officers were aristocrats, and in some armies this was even more the case at the end of the period than at the beginning. At a time when Frederick the Great, an acknowledged expert on such matters, declared that “the one thing that can make men march into the muzzles of the cannon that are trained at them is honor,” depriving aristocratic officers of their means par excellence of avenging insults to that honor was impossible and counter-productive. In fact Tsar Peter III, who ruled Russia from January 1762 until June of that year and who was an admirer of Frederick, was said to be a failed duelist himself.105 The same politeness officers were expected to show their opposite numbers obliged them to duel. The outcome was that the duel, like male adultery, was prohibited in theory but allowed in practice. Often punishments were light, or else letters of pardon were issued to those who had fled justice and later begged to return. That such letters could also serve those who issued them as a useful source of income hardly requires saying.
As has been said, a duel was a miniature war, a trial of courage and skill concentrated into a few intense minutes with the lives of the contestants at stake.106 The duelers themselves understood the system very well. Instead of challenging the authorities head-on, a method that might well lead to dire consequences, they met early in the morning when the chance of discovery was less. Preferably they chose deserted places far from the madding crowd: favorite locations were islands in the middle of rivers where the authority of the state did not apply. For example, the famous duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton took place at a spot known as the Heights of Weehawken in New Jersey, the reason being that New York had outlawed the custom. Others too used it, and for the same reason. From 1700 to 1845 eighteen duels are known to have taken place there; the real number may have been considerably higher.107
The need for secrecy also explains why duels, unlike many other kinds of wargames, only occasionally developed into popular spectator sports. As if to prove how important they had become, the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of manuals that dealt with them. All the most important West European languages of the time – French, Italian, German, and Spanish – were represented.108 So, though it was not yet considered an important language, was English. All the manuals agreed that duels were, strictly speaking, illegal. However, all also argued that custom permitted them even if secular and ecclesiastical law did not. All the manuals were at great pains to spell out the kinds of offenses for which “satisfaction” might be demanded and that might lead to duels. A protocol was laid down. First there would be an offense directed by one ge
ntleman – depending on time and place, the definition of who was a gentleman varied – against another. Next, perhaps, came a countercharge of lying; next, a challenge to fight; next, it was up to the party that made the challenge to choose the time, location, judge, and weapons. To refuse a duel either as a means to redeem one’s honor or when challenged meant losing face in the eyes of society.
These technicalities having been settled, the two men would meet at the appointed place. Each would be accompanied by one or more seconds, called “godfathers” (padrino, parrain) in Spanish and French. Their function was to act as witnesses, ensure that the rules were observed, and render what assistance was needed either before the fight or after it was over. The duelists would swear that their cause was just. The signal having been given, the fighting started. If only because the parties would never agree to duel if their chances of emerging as victors were not equal, very great care was taken to balance them in terms of what they could wear, the arms that they could use, the manner in which the engagement was fought, and what their seconds were and were not allowed to do. The selected piece of ground had to be level and free of obstacles, the hour chosen in such a way that neither combatant would have the sun in his eyes, and so on. Even the lamps that the seconds carried had to be held in such a way as to avoid blinding the combatants. The intention behind these precautions was to exclude all kinds of ruses as well as the possibility of surprise. Though there were important differences between one country and the next, on the whole the later the date the more detailed the rules and the more genteel the duels.
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