A single murder triggered a feud cycle because noble courts refused protection.

Evidence

To follow the stages of the buildup of one such feud is instructive. We learn from a memorandum drawn up in 1586 by the abbot of Rueda (an interested party, for this ecclesiastic was the feudal lord of Codo) that a Morisco called Calvete killed a mountain man called Oliv´an somewhere between Belchite and Codo as Oliv´an was grazing his beasts. A revenge attack was launched on November 4: five mountain men with flintlocks attacked five unarmed Moriscos working in the fields; two were shot dead. The Moriscos brought the matter before the prior of the monastery of Rueda, but he told them they should take their complaint to the noble on whose lands the attack had taken place. The Moriscos, fobbed off in this way, must have concluded that justice was not to be had through the courts. The system of protection by the nobility in which they had trusted was not working for them. They must have taken the law into their own hands, for on December 17 the corpses of two mutilated mountain men were found in the fields. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1196

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the feud-cycle logic (honor-based tit-for-tat escalation when formal justice fails) seen in Mediterranean honor cultures and in Things Fall Apart’s blood-price dynamics.