Episode Notes:
In 1325, soldiers from Modena snuck into the city of Bologna in the middle of the night and stole a wooden bucket from a well. Bologna declared war. Two thousand men died. The bucket is still in Modena. Bologna has never gotten it back.
That is the legend. The truth is messier, bloodier, and in some ways more interesting. Behind the bucket were two hundred years of accumulated grievance between two rival Italian city-states, the grinding factional violence of the Guelph and Ghibelline conflict, and a battle in which a seven-thousand-man Modenese force defeated a Bolognese army more than four times its size—then held a celebratory race outside the walls of the city they had just humiliated.
Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific mechanics of how medieval Italian city-states fought and why they could never stop; the Battle of Zappolino and the military craft that turned a hopeless mismatch into a rout; the seventeenth-century satirical epic poem the conflict inspired; and the bucket itself—still sitting in a tower in Modena seven hundred years later, still not returned, still the subject of a rivalry that has never quite died.
If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you’re just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.
Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it—slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are eleven more waiting for you.
Sources are listed in the show notes:
- Wikipedia contributors. War of the Bucket. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
- Wikipedia contributors. Battle of Zappolino. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
- Tassoni, Alessandro. La secchia rapita. Paris, 1622.
- Griffoni, Matteo. Conflictus Zapolini, Memoriale historicum de rebus bononiensium. Circa 1325.
- Abulafia, David, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume Five. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Britannica editors. Guelphs and Ghibellines. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
- HistoryNet. What We Learned from the Battle of Zappolino, 1325. 2022.
- All That’s Interesting. The Bizarre History of the War of the Bucket. 2023.
- Amusing Planet. The War of the Bucket. 2023.