It is easy to multiply examples illustrating this. John van Arckel, a knight of Holland, followed Godfrey of Bouillon to the first crusade. When some German forces joined the army, a Tyrolese noble, seeing van Arckel’s arms displayed before his tent, and recognizing them as identical with his own, ordered them torn down. The insult was flagrant, but the injured knight sought no immediate satisfaction for his honor. He laid the case before the chiefs of the crusade as a judicial matter; an examination was made, and both parties proved their ancestral right to the same bearings. To decide the conflicting and incompatible pretensions, the judges ordered the judicial combat, in which van Arckel deprived his antagonist of life and quarterings together, and vindicated his claim to the argent 2 bars gules, which in gratitude to Heaven he bore for eight long years in Palestine. This was not a quarrel on a punctilio, nor a mode of obtaining redress for an insult, but an examination into a legal question which admitted of no other solution according to the manners of the age.[289] When, after the Sicilian Vespers, the wily Charles of Anjou was sorely pressed by his victorious rival Pedro III. of Aragon, and desired to gain time in order to repress a threatened insurrection among his peninsular subjects, he sent a herald to Don Pedro to accuse him of bad faith in having commenced the war without defiance. The fiery Catalan fell into the snare, and in order to clear himself of the charge, which was not ill-founded, he offered to meet his accuser in combat and determine their rights to the Sicilian throne. The terms were laboriously settled by six representatives of each king and were signed by the principals December 26, 1282; they were to meet, with a hundred knights on each side, June 1, 1283, in the neutral territory of Bordeaux and fight it out in the presence of Edward I. of England or of his deputy, and each swore that if he failed to be present he would forever hold himself as false and perjured and deprived of the royal station and dignity. When Charles applied to his cousin Edward to grant the _champ-clos_ the latter emphatically replied that for the crowns of the Two Sicilies he would not be judge in such a combat; Martin II. chimed in with a bull forbidding him to serve, and the combat never took place, Charles of Anjou having obtained his purpose in the intervening suspension of arms.[290] Nothing more picturesquely romantic is to be found in the annals of chivalry than Muntaner’s relation of Don Pedro’s secret ride to Bordeaux and his appearance on the day appointed in the lists where Edward’s seneschal was unable to guarantee him a fair field.[291] So the challenge which Richard II., in 1383, sent to Charles VI. wore the aspect of the judicial duel to decide their claims to the realms of France under the judgment of God.[292] Though practically these challenges may differ little from that of Antony, still their form and