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Hi, everybody.

From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

Thanks so much for joining me today.

Now, if you go to search on YouTube, you can still see a few examples of real duels with swords or pistols from the very earliest days of film.

But for the most part, duels are a distant memory. They're a relic of a bygone age, the product of ways of thinking about violence and honor that have long since disappeared.

Yet for centuries, duels were a regular occurrence, a formal combat between two people according to an agreed-upon set of rules in order to settle some kind of dispute, large or small, between those parties.

And duels were only the tip of the iceberg of interpersonal violence in the early modern and late medieval periods in Europe. Noblemen feuded over inheritances, would-be aristocrats

quarreled about precedents, and well-to-do peasants carried out generations-long vendettas against

their cousins in the next valley over. Local lords died in disputes over who got to sit in the most prestigious

pew in the village church. The sons of counts and barons took pot shots at each other with

arquebuses and crossbows when they argued about who got to hunt in a specific patch of woodland.

That kind of violence was endemic. It was sewn into the fabric of the world. And if we want to

make sense of that period of time, then we need to understand how and why that sort of thing happened so often.

Today's guest has gone deeper into exploring conflict and violence in early modern Europe than anybody else.

Stuart Carroll is Professor of History at the University of York and a specialist on the history of Europe in the early modern period. He's written a number of books, including the absolute classic blood and

violence in early modern France, and more recently enmity and violence in early modern Europe,

which I recently finished reading and absolutely loved. Professor Carroll, thank you so much

for joining me today. Hi, Patrick, and hi, all your listeners out there.

So how did you get interested in early modern Europe, and what then drew you to the study of enmity and violence?

Yeah, when I was a student, I was really actually mainly interested in modern history and mainly modern British history.

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