Dueling

Dueling is an arranged combat between two people using matched weapons, historically fought to settle a matter of honor and evolving out of medieval judicial combat before becoming formalized during the Renaissance. Duels were fought with swords into the eighteenth century and increasingly with pistols thereafter, and they were subject to legal prohibition from an early date: the Fourth Council of the Lateran outlawed dueling in 1215, and further civil legislation against it followed in the Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years' War, so that by the early seventeenth century dueling was illegal in the countries where it continued to be practiced. Despite these prohibitions the practice persisted for centuries, with its eventual decline attributed more to shifting public opinion and rising state capacity than to the laws themselves, and by the First World War it was widely regarded as an anachronism across the Western world. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/