In 1325, two Italian city-states fought a real battle with thousands of troops — all supposedly over a stolen wooden bucket that Modena still keeps on display.
In 1325, the Italian city-states of Modena and Bologna — long-standing enemies in the Guelph-Ghibelline rivalry — went to war. The popular legend holds that the war started when Modenese soldiers raided a Bolognese well and stole a wooden bucket. The truth is slightly less absurd, but the bucket was real.
The actual trigger was Modena's capture of the strategic Bolognese fortress of Monteveglio in September 1325. The bucket was taken afterward as a trophy — but the legend that it was the cause of the war proved so irresistible that it eclipsed the real history.
At the Battle of Zappolino in November 1325, Bologna mobilized an enormous army of 32,000 troops to avenge the insult. Modena met them with just 7,000 soldiers under commander Passerino Bonacolsi. The outnumbered Modenese won decisively, routing the Bolognese back into their own city walls.
The war was one episode in the centuries-long Guelph-Ghibelline conflict that fractured northern Italy. Bologna backed the Pope; Modena backed the Holy Roman Emperor. The broader conflict didn't formally end until 1529, when Spanish imperial power forced a settlement.
The 17th-century poet Alessandro Tassoni immortalized the bucket war in a famous mock-heroic epic called La secchia rapita ('The Stolen Bucket'), which later inspired an opera by Antonio Salieri — Mozart's great rival — in 1772.
The bucket itself, a plain wooden oak pail, reportedly still exists today, kept in the Torre della Ghirlandina bell tower in Modena. It became one of the more absurd trophies in the history of warfare.