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The fencer is by fencing overcome...
Tasso, “Gerusalemme Liberata”
IN 1665, OSTUNI in the Difesa di Malta was the scene of a duel that, after the Disfida of Barletta, is the most famous personal combat in Apulian history. It was fought by two great noblemen, both of whose families had given many Knights to the ‘Hierosolomitan Order’ – Cosmo, Count of Conversano and Petracone V, Duke of Martina Franca.
Son of the terrible Giangirolamo II, Count Cosmo was thirty-eight years old. Just as his unloved father had been given a nickname, ‘Il Guercio’ (the Squinter), he himself was known as ‘O Sfidante’ (the Challenger). A lethal swordsman, the count was a veteran duellist who had already killed an alarming number of opponents. He had also taken a leading part in the bloodthirsty repression of the Neapolitan riots of 1661. Savagely morose, he was as dangerous as he was quarrelsome.
Count Cosmo nursed an especially bitter hatred for his Apulian neighbour, the elderly Michele Imperiali, Prince of Francavilla. This stemmed from a long-running family vendetta, that had begun when Cosmo was a child – erupting into a full-scale battle in a Neapolitan street in 1630 – between the Acquaviva of Conversano and the Caracciolo of Martina Franca, supported by their kinsmen, the Imperiali of Francavilla Fontana. Friends and servants joined in the fighting. By the time the police arrived several combatants had been killed while twelve were badly wounded. Everyone still on his feet was arrested, only Fra’ Titta Caracciolo, a Knight of Malta, managing to escape.
Prince Michele had taken a leading part in the “battle”. Meeting the Prince by chance one day in 1664 at the viceregal court at the royal palace in Naples, the count immediately challenged him to a duel and thrashed him with the flat of his sword. The Viceroy at once placed both men under arrest, hoping that their tempers would cool. But when they were released, Prince Michele, who was too aged and decrepit to fight, asked his nephew Petracone Caracciolo, Duke of Martina Franca, to do so in his place. The unfortunate Duke could not refuse. Since he was only seventeen, the duel was postponed until he came of age in twelve months time.
Understandably, young Duke Petracone grew very apprehensive. Keppel Craven tells us how he found out just what he would have to face:
A gentleman, who had been sometime, as was the custom in those days, a retainer in his family, left it abruptly one night, and sought the Count of Conversano’s castle, into which he gained admission by a recital of the injurious treatment and fictitious wrongs, heaped upon him by the tyrannical and arbitrary temper of the Prince of Francavilla. A complaint of this nature was always the passport to the Count’s favour and good graces, and he not only admitted this gentleman to the full enjoyment of his princely hospitality, but having found he was an experienced and dextrous swordsman, passed most of his time in practising with him that art.
A few days before the duel, the gentleman, who was a spy – one source says he had been both men’s fencing master – left Conversano and went to Martina Franca, where he reported to Duke Petracone:
the only chance of success which he could look to, was by keeping on the defensive during the early part of the combat; he was instructed that his antagonist, though avowedly the most able manager of the sword in the kingdom, was extremely violent, and that if he could parry the first thrusts made on the first attack, however formidable from superior skill and strength of wrist and arm, he might perhaps afterwards obtain success over an adversary, whose person, somewhat inclined to corpulency, would speedily become exhausted.
When Petracone reached the age of eighteen in 1665, a meeting was arranged at Ostuni, on 19 July. Before he rode to meet his doom, the Duke made his will and confessed his sins, saying goodbye to his mother, who went into her chapel to pray. ‘O Sfidante’ ate an unusually good breakfast and then, taking leave of his wife muttered carelessly, “Vado a far’ un capretto” – “I’m off to kill a kid.”
The combatants had arranged to fight their duel as publicly as possible, on the forecourt of the great Franciscan friary just outside the walls, one of the city’s most imposing buildings and only recently completed. Warned by the friars, however, the Bishop of Ostuni, in cope and mitre and bearing the Host, was waiting to stop them. Followed by an eager crowd, the two duellists looked for an alternative arena, settling on a little paved yard in front of the Capuchin church. Petracone’s second was his sixteen year old brother, Innico, Cosmo’s his eldest son, Girolamo – the same age as Petracone. Their weapons were rapiers with blades three foot long, balanced by daggers in their left hands.
When the combat started, according to a chronicler from Noci, Count Cosmo attacked Petracone so ferociously and skilfully that it seemed scarcely possible the young Duke could survive. Yet, somehow he warded off the Count’s thrusts, letting him tire himself out. Then, to the crowd’s astonishment, Petracone succeeded in wounding Cosmo. He asked if honour had been satisfied, but the enraged Count’s only answer was to rush at the Duke. Receiving a second thrust, Cosmo fell to the ground, streaming with blood, whereupon Petracone and Innico mounted their horses and hastily rode away.
A friar helped Count Cosmo rise to his feet. Clutching his right breast from which blood was still pouring, he staggered into the friary, demanding a confessor. He died a few hours later.
Everyone had expected the duel to end very differently. A band of assassins, brigands hired by the Prince of Francavilla, waited in vain for Count Cosmo on the road home to Conversano.