page_title: Feud
section_title: Vendetta history
hierarchical_section_title: Feud / Blood feuds/vendetta / Vendetta history
caption_attribution_description: English: Lock-in tower, Thethi, northern Albania, used as refuge for men involved in a blood feud (Gjakmarrja, or Hakmarrja, the social custom from the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit) that are vulnerable to attack. עברית: מגדל מבוצר בכפר ת'ת'י, צפון אלבניה.
context_page_description: A feud is a long-running argument or fight between parties. In most cases it involves whole familles or clans. People are seen as guilty, not because they did something, but because they were seen with other people. This is called guilt by association.
  Feuds start because one party thinks they were attacked, insulted, or otherwise harmed by the other party. Intense feelings of resentment trigger the initial revenge, which causes the other party to feel the same way. The dispute is then fueled by a long-running cycle of retaliatory violence. This ongoing cycle of provocation and retaliation makes it very difficult to end the feud peacefully. Feuds frequently involve the original parties' family members and/or associates. They can last for generations.
  Up to the early modern period, feuds were considered legitimate legal instruments. The state or ruler even made laws for certain aspects of feuds. Once modern centralizing states asserted and enforced a monopoly on legitimate use of force, feuds became illegal and the concept acquired its current negative connotation.
context_section_description: Originally, a vendetta was a blood feud between two families. Kinsmen of the victim wanted to take revenge for his or her death by killing either those responsible for the killing or some of their relatives. Usually, the closest male relative of the person killed or wronged  maintains the vendetta, but other members of the family may do so as well. If the culprit had disappeared or was already dead, the vengeance could extend to other relatives.
  Vendetta is typical of societies with a weak rule of law or in those where the state does not consider itself responsible for helping with this kind of dispute. In such societies, family and kinship ties are the main source of authority. An entire family is considered responsible for whatever one of them has done. Sometimes even two separate branches of the same family could come to blows over some matter.
  Today, the practice of vendetta has almost disappeared in societies where  law enforcement works. There, criminal law punishes lawbreakers.
  In ancient Homeric Greece, the practice of personal vengeance against wrongdoers was considered natural and customary: "Embedded in the Greek morality of retaliation is the right of vendetta . . . Vendetta is a war, just as war is an indefinite series of vendettas; and such acts of vengeance are sanctioned by the gods".
  The Ancient Hebrew tribes considered it to be the duty of the individual and family to avenge evil in God's name. The person who put the initial aggressive killer to death was given a special name: go'el haddam, the blood-avenger or blood-redeemer (Num. 35: 19, etc.). Six cities of refuge were made to provide a "cooling off" phase as well as due process for the accused. As the Oxford Companion to the Bible states: "Since life was viewed as sacred (Gen. 9.6), no amount of blood money could be given as recompense for the loss of the life of an innocent person; it had to be 'life for life'" (Exod. 21.23; Deut. 19.21)".
  According to medievalist Marc Bloch, "The Middle Ages, from beginning to end, and particularly the feudal era, lived under the sign of private vengeance. The onus, of course, lay above all on the wronged individual; vengeance was imposed on him as the most sacred of duties ... The solitary individual, however, could do but little. Moreover, it was most commonly a death that had to be avenged. In this case the family group went into action and the faide (feud) came into being, to use the old Germanic word which spread little by little through the whole of Europe--'the vengeance of the kinsmen which we call faida', as a German canonist expressed it. No moral obligation seemed more sacred than this ... The whole kindred, therefore, placed as a rule under the command of a chieftain, took up arms to punish the murder of one of its members or merely a wrong that he had suffered" (Marc Bloch, trans. L. A. Manyon, Feudal Society, Vol. I, 1965, p. 125-126).
  The Celtic phenomenon of the blood feud demanded "an eye for an eye," and usually descended into murder. Disagreements between clans might last for generations in Scotland and Ireland. Due to the Celtic heritage of many whites living in Appalachia, a series of prolonged violent engagements in late- nineteenth-century Kentucky and West Virginia were referred to commonly as feuds, a tendency that was partly due to the nineteenth-century popularity of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, authors who both wrote semihistorical accounts of blood feuds. These incidents, the most famous of which was the Hatfield-McCoy feud, were regularly featured in the newspapers of the eastern U.S. between the 1880s and the early twentieth century. Although they were interpreted as such at the time, there is little reason to believe that these American incidents had any correlation to "feuding" in Europe centuries earlier.
  Chariot racing in the Byzantine Empire also included the racing clubs. The Blues and the Greens were more than simply sports teams. They gained influence in military, political, and theological matters. The Blue-Green rivalry often erupted into gang warfare, and stre
caption: A fortified tower used as refuge for men involved in a blood feud that are vulnerable to attack. Thethi, northern Albania.
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