ABSTRACT
Europe, it has been observed, ‘has been formed by war’; 1 it has been further observed that to state that ‘Europe invented warfare and that warfare was its principal bequest to the rest of humanity would be an exaggeration but not a large one’. 2 Certainly the first statement contains more than a grain of truth. Similarly the statement that sport and war have been tightly linked in European history also contains more than the proverbial grain of truth.
