Just one year before publishing the sabre treatise that would solidify his legacy in the German-speaking world, Luigi Barbasetti made his authorial debut not with treatise on fencing, but a duelling code. His code appeared in the German language in early 1898 bearing the title Ehren-Codex, having been translated from Italian and 'adapted for Austro-Hungarian use' by military officer and fencing instructor Gustav Ristow.1 Only a few months later an Italian-language version appeared, published under the similarly generic title Codice Cavalleresco.2 Scans of my own Italian copy can be viewed in the link below.
While the fact that the German publication was a translation would suggest that this book was simply the publication of Barbasetti's original Italian manuscript, he himself explicitly states in the introduction that this text was actually translated back to Italian from the German edition of the book, although by whom exactly we are never told. The Italian text has however been 'slightly revised', and also features a preface by the Italian jurist Costantino Castori. Due to the complicated legal status of duelling in Italy, this was clearly an effort on the publisher's part to put a legitimising stamp on what was in essence the regulation of extra-judicial violence.3
Barbasetti's ever-growing reputation as a fencing master would certainly have been helpful in providing him some authority in matters of honour, yet this by no means made his duelling code immune from criticism. Some Austrian commentators noted that Barbasetti's code was an attempt to impose Italian duelling customs on the more Germanic-oriented customs of Austria and Hungary.4 One such foreign custom was Barbasetti's explicit refusal to allow the thrust to be excluded in the duel as a safety measure. Another was that while Barbasetti forbade duels to death, his allowance for duels to be carried out ad oltranza, or 'to the extreme', was viewed as being both morally and legally no different, as it required combat to end 'only when one [of the combatants] falls to the ground, or is unable to continue due to receiving a very serious wound.'5
Barbasetti's code reflected a common view in Italy at the time that although the act of duelling was deplorable and that society should seek to irradicate it altogether, for the meantime duelling was unfortunately still necessary due to the lack of legal recourse available to those who had their honour besmirched by another. In line with this view, Barbasetti opposed duels to first blood as well as any other provisions to reduce the severity of a duel (such as excluding use of the point with sabres), believing that the best way to reduce the prevalence of duels was to ensure that they were not conducted over petty matters with little risk. In Germanic cultures, by contrast, it was common to exclude the thrust in sabre either by tacit agreement between the duellists or by blunting the points entirely.6 Many Italian duelling commentators like Barbasetti ridiculed this practice, as in their eyes reducing the potential lethality of a duel, thereby lowering the stakes for the duellists, only encouraged men to behave more provocatively and deploy insults more freely.7
One notable writer to criticise Barbasetti on this point was Gusztáv Arlow, whose 1902 sabre treatise is one of the foundational texts of the Italo-Hungarian school. In a short section at the end of his treatise discussing how to conduct sabre duels, Arlow makes a point to criticise Barbasetti (as well as his translator Ristow) in a footnote almost half a page long. Barbasetti's measures to reduce the severity of duels, even those which result from minor offences, were apparently antiquated and reckless, exasperatedly remarking: 'Human frivolity knows no bounds.'8 He was also critical of the fact that the code was supposedly adapted to 'Austro-Hungarian' customs, as this to him demonstrates a lack of a understanding of how different Austrian and Hungarian duelling customs could be.
Both the German and Italian versions were received positively by the sporting press, and in fact the Italian Gazzetta dello Sport reported that the first printing of the German text had completely sold out by July 1898.9 It remained popular enough in both languages to warrant a second Italian edition in 1905, with second and third editions of the German text appearing in 1901 and 1908 respectively.10 Despite the warm reception in Italy, Barbasetti was never able to unseat the very popular code by Jacopo Gelli, which was then already in its 8th edition and continued to be republished up until the eve of the Second World War.11
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1 Luigi Barbasetti, Ehren-Codex, trans. Gustav Ristow (Vienna: Verlag der Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, 1898).↩2 Luigi Barbasetti, Codice Cavalleresco (Milan: Alessandro Gattinoni, 1898).↩
3 For an excellent deep-dive on Italian duelling culture at this time, see Stephen Hughes, Politics of the Sword: Dueling, Honor, and Masculinity in Modern Italy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007).↩
4 S. Leo, "Pacemacher des Todes," Feuilleton, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 June 1898, 2–3; Hermann Bahr, "Barbasetti," Feuilleton, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 21 January 1900, 1–2.↩
5 Barbasetti, Codice Cavalleresco, 110.↩
6 Hans Kufahl and Josef Schmied-Kowarzik, Duellbuch: Geschichte des Zweikampfes nebst einem Anhang enthaltend Duellregeln und Paukcomment (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1896), 221.↩
7 Hughes, Politics of the Sword, 181–2.↩
8 Gusztáv Arlow, Sir Gusztáv Arlow's Sabre Fencing, trans. Annamária Kovács, ed. Russ Mitchell (Irving, TX: Happycrow Publishing, 2022), 234.↩
9 "Fra le pubblicazioni," Scherma, La Gazzetta dello Sport, 4 July 1898, 1. For some full reviews, see Camillo Müller, "Über den neuen Ehrencodex," Duellwesen, Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, 13 February 1898, 156–7; J. H. Aubry, "Un nouveau code," Journal des Sports, 23 March 1898, 1; Roderico Rizzotti, "Codice cavalleresco di Luigi Barbasetti," Scherma, La Gazzetta dello Sport, 1 August 1898, 2; "Codice cavalleresco Barbasetti," L'Indipendente (Trieste), 17 September 1898, 2.↩
10 Luigi Barbasetti, Codice Cavalleresco (Turin: R. Streglio, 1905); Ehren-Kodex, trans. Gustav Ristow (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1901); Ehren-Kodex, trans. Bernhard Dimand (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1908).↩
11 Jacopo Gelli, Codice Cavalleresco Italiano, 8th ed. (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1896). This duelling code had a tremendously long life, seeing an 18th edition in 1938.↩
