The War of the Bucket: Modena's 1325 trophy wasn't the cause

The War of the Bucket was a real war: in November 1325, a heavily outnumbered army from Modena routed the forces of Bologna at Zappolino, and the victors carried a wooden bucket from a Bolognese well home as a trophy. The bucket was a souvenir of the war, not its cause — the reverse of the story usually told.

The popular version has Modenese raiders stealing the pail from Bologna’s town well, the Bolognese demanding it back, and war following. Historian Kenneth Bartlett of the University of Toronto points to a likelier trigger: Modena’s capture of the Bolognese fortress of Monteveglio in September 1325, the last straw after years of border raids. Beneath it lay the feud between Guelphs, who backed the papacy, and Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperor, with the two cities on opposite sides.

The odds made the result a humiliation. Bologna reportedly fielded some 30,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry against Modena’s 5,000 foot and 2,000 horse, but Bologna’s army was largely untrained militia, while Modena’s included professional German soldiers sent by the emperor. The fighting is said to have lasted about two hours — brief, though nowhere near the shortest war in history — with each side inflicting around 1,000 casualties before the Bolognese broke. The often-quoted “2,000 dead” appears to stretch that rough casualty count into a death toll. The Modenese chased their enemies back to the city walls, and the bucket was taken from a public well in Via San Felice after the victory.

Where the bucket hangs now

Modena still has it. The original is kept in the Camerino dei Confirmati of the city’s Palazzo Comunale, while a replica is displayed in the Ghirlandina, the cathedral bell tower where the original hung for centuries. Its fame owes most to the poet Alessandro Tassoni, whose 1622 mock-heroic epic La secchia rapita (“The Stolen Bucket”) turned a provincial war into a joke all Italy knew; in 1772 Antonio Salieri made it an opera.