Why did pre-battle champion duels exist, and why did they disappear?In many ancient and early medieval wars, armies sometimes selected a small number of champions or even a single pair of fighters to fight before the main battle. Persians, Greeks, Romans, and even Jewish sources describe such encounters, where the outcome of the duel could decide morale or even the fate of the battle itself, sometimes without the full armies ever clashing. These practices seem to persist into late antiquity and even the early Islamic conquests.Not every battle featured them, but they were a recognizable and recurring feature of warfare for centuries.At some point, however, this tradition vanished. By the time of early modern warfare and certainly by the Napoleonic Wars or World Wars no armies settled battles through champion duels.Why did these duels emerge in the first place, and what structural, cultural, or technological changes caused them to disappear?
>>18246740They only really happened in very small battles and rarely at that. And the duels were for morale more than anything. It mostly died off in Europe with the Hundred Years War and in Japan with the Onin War but course random duels were still happen.
They rarely fought to the last man morale was everything and losses where heaviest when their forces were routed.
>>18246740What's the point of doing it with firearmsThese days you would jave to use drones anyeay
>>18247174balloons and blunderbusses!
>>18246740Ritualized warfare is based. Instead of trying to outsmart God with freaky infernal technology or win battles by deception, let's have the leader of the army or a representative come out and show the human quality of his cause. Africans had it right in the pre-Zulu times, there's no need for excessive killing.
>>18246740Is this the artist who draws historically accurate r34?
>>18246740They come up fairly frequently in the history of the early Muslim conquests. So seemly a common trend on pre-islamic and proto islamic arabia.
