QuickCheck: Did stealing a bucket spark a bloody war?


A mural in the Bologna City Museum depicting the triumphant Modenese toting the captured Bolognese water bucket home after the two-hour battle. Credit: https://www.historynet.com/what-we-learned-from-the-battle-of-zappolino-1325/

WAR. What is it good for? Human history is filled with senseless violence and usually, it is justified by "noble" notions like freedom or modernisation, or straight-up greed for oil, land or gold. But sometimes, humans resort to murdering one another over the most trivial of things, giving the term "senseless violence" a literal meaning.

A good example could be when two medieval city-states in northern Italy – Modena and Bologna – supposedly fought a war due to the theft of an ordinary unremarkable wooden bucket.

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