Disfida Di Barletta: The Challenge of Barletta and the Death of Chivalry February 13, 1503

  By 1503 King Louis XII of France and King Ferdinand I of Spain (then known as Ferdinand II of Aragon) have spent the past two years, aided by mercenaries and knights loyal to local rulers, warring with one another up and down the Italian Peninsula.  

Both Louis XII of France and Ferdinand I of Spain assert familial claims to the thrones of the Italian city states of Naples and Milan and each has dispatched a formidable army to Italy to drive home the point.

Originally allies who had agreed to split the newly conquered Kingdom of Naples between themselves in 1501, Louis XII and Ferdinand I had a falling out over how to equally divide the spoils soon after their combined Franco-Spanish army had defeated the Neapolitans and a state of war has existed between France and Spain ever since.  

Caught in the middle of this late-medieval struggle between two of Europe’s greatest powers, Italian rulers have variously thrown their support behind both Spain and France as the tides of war have shifted back and forth over the past two years.

King Louis XII of France

In January 1503 the Spanish army, led by the legendary knight and General Fernandez de Cordoba, called “El Gran Capitan” by his men for his martial exploits, barricades itself within the fortress walls of the southern Italian city of Barletta.

Barletta is a picturesque city near the Adriatic coast with a storied and violent past that dates back to the third century BC when the Barletta region was the site of the climactic Battle of Cannae where the legendary Carthaginian leader Hannibal annihilated a Roman Legion twice his army’s size during the Second Punic War in 216 BC.

At the beginning of 1503 a French army assaults Barletta and lays siege to Cordoba’s Spanish forces within the city’s walls.  All through the month of January of that year repeated French assaults are repulsed by the combined forces of Cordoba and his Italian allies.  The Spanish and Italians capture many French knights in these repeated assaults on the city and hold them for ransom.

Statue of General Cordoba

Foremost among these knights held for ransom is French General and nobleman Charles de la Motte.   After defeating the French in battle and taking la Motte prisoner in the process the Spanish knights hold an enormous banquet in honor of their Italian allies within the walls of Barletta.  Given the chivalric code of honor of the times, Charles de la Motte, even as a prisoner of war, is accorded a spot of honor at the banquet.

In the midst of the grand celebration, drunk on wine, de la Motte stands up and declares, “These so called Italian knights you celebrate are no more than cowards in battle.”

The great banquet hall, only moments before the scene of uproarious drunken celebration and laughter, falls deathly silent after de la Motte makes his accusation of cowardice in battle against the Italian knights.

Incensed, the Italians respond in kind with insults directed at the French knights they hold captive, accusing the Frenchmen of being unwanted foreign trespassers in their homeland and of being effeminate in demeanor.  

That night at the conclusion of the banquet the Italian knights meet and all are in agreement that such an insult to their honor, within the walls of their own city, can neither be forgiven nor forgotten.

The next morning two Italian knights Giovanni Capoccio and Giovanni Brancaleone, ride out from the walls of Barletta under a flag of truce and enter the French encampment.  Upon entering the French camp the Italians demand a formal apology, in writing on behalf of the French army for the scandalous insults of Charles de la Motte.  The French refuse to apologize and instead demand de la Motte’s release.

With their honor in question the Italians challenge the French to a duel by single combat.  The French not wishing to be cowards in their own right have no choice but to accept the challenge.

The two sides agree to hold a knightly battle to the death consisting of a series of jousts to be held on neutral ground in the no man’s land between the two armies.  Each side, both the Italian and French, will hand pick thirteen knights to face off against one another in single combat.

Carpaccio and Brancaleone ride back to Barletta and send out the call for thirteen brave Italian knights to step forward to defend their nation’s honor.  Italian volunteers readily answer the Challenge.  Leading the Italian knights in the Challenge is Ettore Fieramosca.  Ettore Fieramosca comes from Capua in the Campania region of Italy.  He is perhaps the nation’s most fierce condottieri, or mercenary, and he has already distinguished himself in battle against the French.

 Charles de la Motte, the instigator of the Challenge, is released from Spanish custody and will lead the handpicked contingent of thirteen French knights in single combat.  It is de la Motte who chose the number 13 because he believed that the Italians, whom he considered to be overly superstitious and backwards would most likely back out at the last moment given the unlucky overtones associated with the number thirteen.  De la Motte’s assumptions, however, prove to be incorrect.

At dawn on the morning of February 13, 1503 the two sides, twenty-six heavily armed knights in full armor mounted atop the mightiest war horses of both armies meet on a neutral field outside the city of Barletta to defend their nation’s honor in jousting and single combat.

For an entire day the deafening sound of steel clashing against steel can be heard as knights in full armor attempt to knock one another off their horses using lances, swords, maces and battle axes with intent to kill.  Chivalry dictates that a knight only needs to make his opponent surrender, tap out if you will, and not kill him to maintain his honor.

The Challenge of Barletta February 13, 1503

As morning turns to afternoon the great Challenge of Barletta, known in Italian as the Disfida di Barletta continues with neither side giving sway as the jousting turns into a land based melee on foot.  In hand to hand combat, with shield pressing against shield and swordplay giving way to kicking and shoving, the Italians who are more experienced in the rough and tumble no-holds-barred techniques of mercenary combat win the day!

At the end of the Challenge of Barletta the proud Charles de la Motte is forced to issue a formal apology to the Italian knights that he insulted and the French army gives up the siege and retreats from before the walls of the city in humiliation.

Word of the French defeat quickly spreads throughout the Italian Peninsula and all the way to Sicily.  For hundreds of years, even during the Italian unification wars of the 19th century, Italians will take pride in what they call the Disfida di Barletta.

In 1833, attune to the Italian nationalist sentiment of the time, author Massimo D’Azeglio wrote a work of historical fiction entitled Ettore Fieramosca, which became widely popular and made the Italian leader of the Disfida di Barletta for which his novel was named a symbol of the burgeoning 19th century Italian nationalist movement.

What happened on February 13, 1503 on a field outside Barletta in the no man’s land between two opposing armies marked one of the last, and most famous examples, of the medieval chivalric tradition of single combat.

Single combat over questions of honor between either individual knights, or groups of knights, was a standard practice on medieval battlefields, often with individual combats being ceremoniously held as a prelude to pitched battles between larger armies.

Title Page to D'Azeglio's Novel

However, with the advent and proliferation of gunpowder; the rise of large interdependent nation states and the creation of ever larger mercenary and in some cases even conscript citizen armies by the 16th century, single combat and along with it chivalry and questions of individual honor largely faded from the battlefield.

Though dueling over questions of honor with pistols, and the issuing of personal challenges  would live on well into the 19th century in both Europe and the United States as a social practice among individuals, the Disfida di Barletta, would be one of the last instances of legendary armored knights mounted atop mighty war horses, guided by a code of chivalry, jousting over individual honor in recorded history.

Even today over five-hundred years later, when the idea of individual knights on horseback squaring off against one another in single combat to decide questions of honor and the fate of kingdoms, is nothing more than the stuff of fairy tales, the southern Italian city of Barletta still rightfully retains the name of the City of the Challenge.