"Because a war could not start until the herald had delivered his message, heralds were not always welcome. When the French...
“Because a war could not start until the herald had delivered his message, heralds were not always welcome. When the French herald carrying the colors of the duchy of Alençon arrived in Brussels in 1635 to present a declaration of war to the Spanish ruler Don Fernando, known as the Cardinal-Infante, he discovered that the Cardinal-Infante refused to grant him an audience. To fulfill his mission, the French herald tossed a copy of the declaration of war from his horse into the middle of an angry crowd. The Spanish herald, however, urged those gathered not to touch the paper lest doing so count as accepting the declaration and thus starting the war. The French herald then raced to the border where he nailed two additional copies to a post and notified the mayor of a nearby village about the postings.”
This is exactly the kind of munchkinning that often gets branded as unrealistic in contemporary (fan)fiction. So naturally I’m sooo here for this.
Sauce? This sounds like it’s from a larger work on Heralds and I really want to see the context. Was there some kind of enforced norm that you couldn’t attack someone until they got your declaration of war?
Basically, yes, there was. This passage is from “The Internationalists: How A Radical Plan To Outlaw War Remade The World”, a lively book of popular legal history that I just finished reading and reviewed here. They were talking about the pre-20C norms governing the declaration of war, which had a number of traditional legal significances: most importantly for practical purposes, that soldiers couldn’t be tried or punished for murder, arson, robbery, etc. that they committed in the course of a declared war (the book provides an extended example, but long story short, a surprise invasion is a good way to get your guys executed in ways that would be much more provocative if they were done to “actual soldiers”).
Territorial gains and monetary plunder acquired in declared war were also unambiguously legal posessions, unlike stuff you might get by hiring pirates or whatever, which was a little suspect. So the incentives were the opposite of today: in favor of soldiers meeting on the battlefield in declared interstate wars over specified grievances, and against indefinite guerilla warfare that’s not associated with state entities.
(The book is basically all about how these international legal norms changed in the 20th century to the system that we know today. It’s a good read.)