Homicide: Types and Motives

In Europe, the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period brought about two changes that affected the character of male fighting and homicide. One was a decline in the relative importance of the larger kin network in favour of the nuclear family.

In turn, this transition led to a decline in feuding, which was also due to other factors such as state repression, at least in western and northern Europe. Of course, people did not simply stop caring about distant cousins, but the requirement to take revenge for the murder of an uncle or nephew all but vanished in most of Europe by the eighteenth century. Likewise, it was no longer necessary to take revenge by attacking a killer's father or brother. It should be noted that all of this involved a very gradual change, and that renewed episodes of feuding, often caused by state breakdown and civil conflict, occurred even in the heartlands of Europe until the mid seventeenth century. On many Mediterranean islands and in some peripheral regions the culture of the vendetta survived into the twentieth century.

The second change involved the gradual acceptance of the virtues of fighting fairly with equal arms and numbers. At the beginning of the early modern period the collapse of medieval chivalric codes had meant that fairness mattered hardly if at all. In sixteenth-century France and Italy, where duelling spread most rapidly and widely, an unfair assault left no stain upon an avenger's honour.^{^[534]} Examples of treachery abound, while ambushes or attacks on weak, old men were common. A group of four or five kinsmen would often set out to retaliate against a single member of an enemy family. As the early modern period progressed such practices increasingly met with peer disapproval. This explains the differences in homicide rates across Europe. North-western Europe led the way in accepting a new rule-bound concept of honour, while Italy continued to be beset by a culture of vendetta.

In northern Europe, in particular, during the seventeenth century traditional male honour still held sway, but it became tied more firmly to the principle of equity and required justification. Next to an equality in the number of combatants on both sides, this principle also involved an equality of weapons. Remarkably, perhaps, increased emphasis on one-on-one fighting emerged at about the same time among groups at the top and the bottom of the social ladder. With the present state of our knowledge, we cannot tell whether this amounted to a process of acculturation among the lower orders. The greater value placed on fairness of fighting did not prevent unfair fights from occurring, but unfairness was a stigma that the man of honour did his best to avoid.

In categorising types of male-on-male fighting in early modern Europe, then, the basic division was fair and unfair. This transformation had much to do with the development of class identities. The elite duel was perceived as superior to the plebeian brawl. In theory, formal duels were agreed upon after a written challenge of the aggrieved party to the prospective opponent, while published codes explained the rules and the honour principle involved. In practice, formal rules and principles of fairness were only slowly established. Until the end of the seventeenth century, in countries like Germany, Italy and France, it was common for seconds - officially non-combating assistants - to take part. At the same time, many duellists handled a second weapon, usually a dagger, with their free hand. Such practices remained common into the seventeenth century. The discrepancy between theory and practice underlines the gradualness of the transition from brawls and melees fought to the death into properly regulated and formalised combats. Since duels were illegal, combatants referred to these fights as encounters, which they claimed were fortuitous and therefore not subject to the law. In general, the early modern period saw a transition from these bloody encounters to more regulated fights to first blood.

This is indicative of wider changes to elite culture and the fact that honour could increasingly be satisfied without recourse to extreme violence.

But duelling was not confined to the elite. The plebeian duel was both similar to and different from its elite counterpart. Gradually, the idea that honour could be satisfied by a fair contest also came to dominate. So, for instance, the popular notion came to prevail that when one of the fighters was in the company of a friend then the latter should refrain from interfering. In some Dutch cases the unaccompanied man complimented the other's friend, saying ‘you are an eerlijk man (a man of honour). All kinds of grievances could lead a man to challenge another to a fight, as with the formal duel, which in both cases did not necessarily result in the death of a combatant. Nevertheless there were significant differences to elite combats. In the popular duel the challenge was verbal rather than on paper. Participants relied on custom since they had no access to written duelling codes or expert opinion. Most elite encounters seem to have been premeditated, whereas the popular duel had greater immediacy. The fight would follow immediately after the challenge on the spot, albeit that, when an insult or quarrel had given rise to a challenge in a tavern, the two men would normally go outside. Although the weapons used were equal in individual instances, various types were common in different parts of Europe. In regions where the plebeian bearing of swords was widespread, for example in the Holy Roman Empire, these were commonly used in the popular duel too. In some places, perhaps most notably in England, where arms bearing by the people was less common, it was fought with fists only. The knife fight, practised in urban as well as rural areas throughout early modern Europe, was perhaps the most widespread and certainly the most notorious form of popular duel, with its own rituals and techniques. In Amsterdam, for example, the use of sticks as a defensive weapon against knives was common.

There is no reason to see these as unfair fights, despite the disparity in weapons. It regularly happened that a man armed with a knife attacked another, for whatever reason, who refused to draw a knife too. Instead, the defender grabbed a stick. For one thing, this allowed him to keep enough distance to his attacker to avoid getting stabbed. The defender could be quite resolute; his aim was either to hit the knife out of his attacker's hand or to deal him such fierce blows that he backed off. This resulted in a precarious equality of chances, exemplified by the fact that, although some stick wielders were stabbed to death, others managed to hit the knife handler so hard that he died. Even here we can discern changes in social and cultural practices. Gentlemen across Europe wielded sticks only to punish their inferiors and beat their tenants. They employed lackeys to administer beatings for them. Knives were increasingly identified as plebeian weapons that a gentleman should not be seen carrying. Even in Italy, they were increasingly seen as dishonourable weapons. In Amsterdam, the evidence leaves no doubt that defenders wielding staves had a social status higher than that of knife fighters: the former considered it beneath their dignity to handle a knife and, consequently, refused to be associated with such a plebeian and dangerous weapon. What this reveals is the ways in which violence and reactions to it were programmed by social status and social expectation.

Truly unfair fights cannot be properly classed as duels. However, it needs to be stressed that the absence of parity did not necessarily result in a loss of honour. The men initiating unequal fights either did not consider unfairness dishonourable or considered that winning at all costs was the surer way of winning honour. Others were motivated by a sense of injustice or that they had been disrespected and considered that any form of retaliation was justifiable. These feelings meant that the cult of honour in early modern Europe often required degrading or humiliating others.

A man increased his own honour by diminishing that of other men. This could take all kinds of forms, from stabbing someone while he was urinating - instances of which are recorded in sixteenth-century France - to snatching away his hat. But these instances also suggest that injured honour was the principle motive in unequal confrontations - an enemy might simply need to be disposed of or humiliated. We should therefore imagine physical confrontations as a continuum from the unprovoked assaults just mentioned to more spontaneous cases in which an angry client in a bar attacked a landlord, which was in turn different from the instrumental violence used by professionals like street robbers and bandits.

This differentiation between different types of violence can probably be extended to the non-Western world in the early modern period. But the present state of research does not permit a systematic comparison. We know, for example, that in samurai culture distinctions were made between fair and unfair fights and virtue or shame were conferred accordingly. The evidence for duelling and knife fighting in Latin America, on the other hand, is largely confined to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although the Cartagena case mentioned earlier had all the features of a duel except the name itself.The persistence of feuding is more discernible in several parts of the world. Feuding was rampant on China's south-east coast, for example, while Macheng county, a mountainous inland region, had a reputation for violence that lasted more than seven centuries. Factional feuds also occurred in early modern Damascus under Ottoman rule, but they were fought by servants and clients only.^{^[535]} The chances for global comparison are better when we turn to motives.

Even in Europe, the historical literature lacks consensus about how to categorise motives for violence. Some authors make a claim for monocau- sal explanations. For example, the anthropologist Alan Fiske claims that all violence is shaped by moral codes.^{^[536]} However, court cases show that the motives for violence are often complex, or unknowable.

Violence, according to anthropologist David Riches, is perspectival, something we can see in the diverging perspectives of the parties involved in an Amsterdam murder trial in 1787. The defendant, a Swedish sailor named Nicolaes Noortsteyn, had upset his superiors on the journey home to Amsterdam by writing a note in which he called the captain Satan, his officers devils, and demanded that the ship's command be transferred to him. Noortsteyn's superiors considered him mad, though once in port he was certified by a doctor to be sane. A few months later, in one of the city's lodging houses, Noortsteyn killed a 19-year-old fellow lodger, stabbing him five times in the chest and belly. During a long set of interrogations the defendant insisted on his sanity; he had committed a sin, he declared, but in the end he admitted that he was tired of life and wished to be executed. For their part, the magistrates entertained the possibility that he had committed the murder under the influence of the teachings of the philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. According to their interpretation, the boy had told Noortsteyn that he longed to be with his mother in heaven; by fulfilling his wish, Noortsteyn believed that he, too, would end up there and that both would experience eternal bliss. What is significant about this case is the concern of the court for the truth and the defendant's welfare.^{^[537]} Finally, the judges concluded that the defendant was insane after all, sending him to the rasphouse, or asylum, for an indefinite period.^{^[538]}

This case offers various possibilities for attributing motive. We might agree with the Amsterdam judges, that it was caused by insanity; alternatively, it lends itself to the label ‘indirect suicide', a typology formulated by Tyge Krogh. Krogh has uncovered what he calls ‘suicide murder', that is, people with a death wish who refused to kill themselves but killed another instead in order to be executed. This was frequent in early modern Scandinavia, where the demands of a strict Lutheran upbringing increased the propensity for self-harm, but where suicide was a mortal sin. Most suicide murderers chose as their victim a girl or boy much younger than the late teen stabbed by Noortsteyn. They believed that an innocent child would definitely go to heaven. This distinction introduces a third possible motive: the victim himself wished also to die and that this was part of what we would call today a ‘suicide pact'. It explains the implicit lack of resistance by the victim in the story. This story has a modern ring to it and reminds us of the ways in which terrorists or the perpetrators of mass murder can be socialised or brainwashed into killing. Noortsteyn was guided by his interpretation of the teachings of the mystic, Swedenborg. This was therefore a killing with a religious or ideological motivation. Various chapters of this volume pay attention to religious violence in the non-Western world, but mostly to the collective variant. The Indian thagi or thugs, whose operations date back to the eighteenth century, constitute an example of religiously inspired violence on a more individual scale, though the interpretation that they strangled unsuspecting travellers in order to ritually offer them to the goddess Kali has been contested. Possibly, they were bandits of a more mundane type, who did believe that a goddess offered them special protection. Nevertheless, there is a close relationship between conscience, morality and violence.

The statistically important role played by bandits and robbers in levels of violence within Europe, most notably in Italy, has also been attested for several parts of the non-Western world. There is no need to dwell on this in detail. In pre-modern societies, with large parts of the population living at subsistence level, life was cheap. However, during the early modern period states increasingly attempted to curb the excesses of soldiers and to differentiate between criminal robbery and actions required by military operations. Bandits counted as dishonourable in most societies, certainly among the propertied classes.^{^[539]} By contrast, more understandable to contemporaries and to some extent allowed by the law was the defence of one's property. It was acceptable for any man when attacked to defend his rights and property. In early modern rural Europe conflicts over land use or the allocation of scarce resources loomed large among motives for homicide. This was equally so in several parts of the non-Western world, such as Qing China. Land and debt constituted one of four categories used by the justice ministry in China to classify homicides.

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Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

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