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How could you expect to sword fight a challenger for your honor if you were missing an arm? It turns out the rules of dueling accounted for this. Duels were to be fights between equals, so if somebody challenged you to a duel, it would be their responsibility to make sure the fight was fair.
it was considered proper by many dueling authorities to find ways to handicap the non-disabled challenger to put them both on as equal grounds as possible. Basic examples that were followed here would include patching over the eye if the challenged party was missing one. More serious writers would go so far as to contend that merely covering was not sufficient, and the challenger ought to have their own eye put out, the argument being that although covered, knowing he nevertheless had a second eye created a disadvantage for the other man since while he could afford to lose one, his opponent couldn’t!
Just how extensively this was practiced in the late 15th to early 16th century is unclear, but it is generally unmentioned by the mid-16th century, and to be sure other writers on honor and dueling considered it to be an absurd suggestion from the start. Other ways to bring about physical quality which can be found in texts from the period include weakening the challenger by forcing them to fast prior to the fight, or by performing a bloodletting, but this too started to die out by the early 1500s, leaving only the temporary handicappings to be followed.
from Lifehacker https://ift.tt/3xYDE6x
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