Duelling codes, though intended to curb violence, may only have ritualized it. DAVID HUGHES

On the night of June 10, 1804, Alexander Hamilton seated himself at his desk in his home in upper Manhattan to finish a letter explaining why the following morning would find him in Weehawken, New Jersey, pointing a flintlock pistol at Vice-President Aaron Burr. He began by listing five moral, religious, and practical objections to duelling, but ruefully concluded, seven paragraphs later, that “what men of the world denominate honor” made it impossible for him to “decline the call.” Burr had placed him in an untenable position. If Hamilton ignored the challenge, Burr would “post” him—that is, publish his refusal in the newspapers—and his political career would effectively be ruined. The next morning, Hamilton had himself rowed across the Hudson.

“If we were truly brave, we should not accept a challenge; but we are all cowards,” a friend of Hamilton’s said after his death. He was thinking not only of Hamilton but of all men in public life whose reputations were at the mercy of political rivals and incendiary journalism. As Joanne B. Freeman makes plain in “Affairs of Honor” (2001), Hamilton and Burr belonged to a class for whom no public offense could go unchallenged even if one felt no personal outrage. Hamilton, too, had issued challenges and seconded other men—one way or another, he had been involved in more than ten “affairs of honor”—while Burr had been party to three duels, including one where he actually took the field. Neither of them was an exception among the Founding Fathers. Button Gwinnet, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, died of wounds received in a duel; and James Monroe refrained from challenging John Adams only because Adams was President at the time. Some years later, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay took part in duels, and even the young Abraham Lincoln came very close to a sword fight with James Shields, a fellow-Illinoisan who eventually became a Union general.

Duelling is an anachronism, of course. This is true because it may still crop up. In 1954, Ernest Hemingway was challenged to a duel in Cuba, but declined. In 1967, two French politicians literally crossed swords in Neuilly. And four years ago a Peruvian legislator challenged his nation’s Vice-President to meet him on a beach near Lima. No one anticipates such shenanigans at Buckingham Palace, but the Queen, as it happens, still retains an official champion who stands ready to challenge anyone who disputes her sovereignty.

This rather daunting fact turns up in James Landale’s “The Last Duel: A True Story of Death and Honor” (Canongate; $24). Landale, a correspondent for the BBC, is descended from one of the two men who fought the last recorded fatal duel on Scottish soil. Relying on a trial transcript, newspaper accounts, bank documents, and the correspondence of the duellists, Landale elegantly reconstructs the circumstances that forced his ancestor David Landale, at the mature age of thirty-nine, to challenge his former banker, George Morgan. David Landale, a linen merchant from the coastal town of Kirkcaldy, just north of Edinburgh, was, if anything, more reluctant than Hamilton to pick up a pistol; he didn’t even own one. But the code of honor extended to wherever men conducted business, and honor dictated that Landale challenge Morgan. The two met in a field on the morning of August 23, 1826; only one left the spot alive.

The word “duel,” most likely an elision of the Latin duellum (war between two), entered the English language around the beginning of the seventeenth century. Single combat, of course, is as old as the hills where David slew Goliath, but no laws regulating its conduct existed until the beginning of the sixth century, when King Gundebald of Burgundy decided that irreconcilable differences could be settled through trial by combat. The judicial duel was, as its name implies, a legal practice, conducted before magistrate and public, whereas the duel of honor was private, secular, and, for most of its history, illegal. It emerged as an institution during the Italian Renaissance, when various aristocrats sought, by affecting an exaggerated sense of honor, to establish themselves as a social, as well as a military, class. Dozens of duelling codes, fencing manuals, and treatises on courtesy soon materialized, prescribing the dress, manners, and rules of combat appropriate to the courtier. In effect, they provided the ground on which abstract notions of honor coalesced into the precepts and axioms that enabled a man of the upper class to live a more noble life. Such a man would always keep his word, always rush to the aid of a comrade or a woman in distress, and never allow an insult or injury to himself or his family to go unavenged.

Shaped by the codes duello, the Italian duel was an elaborate performance in which civility and justice played equal parts. A courtier entered into a duel not to kill his opponent but to reëstablish his honor, his sword a symbolic prop until the moment it was drawn. In fact, so long as the puntiglio d’onore was observed, the outcome of the duel was irrelevant. As the historian Donald Weinstein has said, “The duel imagined (and avoided) was as real and as serious as the duel fought.” A challenge did not always lead to a confrontation. Loopholes and precautions were built into the codes, allowing for a cooling-off period in which the seconds could try to negotiate a peace. The codes also contained detailed instructions for the writing of letters, or cartels, which spelled out the exact nature of the offense and the ways to respond to it. Some Italian gentlemen, apparently, became so fixated on the rules—splitting hairs over some minor point of honor and writing to one another about it—that they never got around to the duel itself.

From Italy, the duel of honor spread to France and then the rest of Europe. Fifty years after Baldassare Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier” (1528) informed men of rank that their “first duty” was to become acquainted with every kind of weapon, the French were making Italians look like stragglers. Not only did the king’s minions fillet each other at the drop of a plumed hat; their seconds and thirds often joined in with what the sixteenth-century writer Pierre Brantôme described as “gaîté de coeur.” Although English gentlemen did not duel with the fervor of their French counterparts, duelling remained a good career move in Britain into the early nineteenth century.

The Irish were redoubtable duellists, but so lacking in decorum when potting each other that, in 1777, delegates from five counties assembled to hammer out the Irish Code Duello. New duelling codes also appeared in France in 1836, in America in 1838, and in Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire around the start of the twentieth century. By then, the German duel had acquired a semi-mythic glow. German students could be found hacking at one another with a Schläger, a straight-edged sword whose abbreviated point, while not lethal, inflicted “bragging scars.” The student duel, known as die Mensur, was an approved pedagogical exercise, a preparatory step toward the all-important duel of honor. Kevin McAleer, the author of “Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany” (1994), contends that duelling was an attempt to recover “an illusory German past in which men of honor righted all manner of wrong with a single stroke of the winking blade.” For generations of German plutocrats, duelling was a bastion against weakness, effeminacy, and decadence. Even Theodor Herzl, one of the first advocates of Zionism, couldn’t help thinking that “a half dozen duels would very much raise the social position of the Jews.”