In many a silly fantasy movie, two warring sides send out their Greatest Warrior to fight the other side’s Somewhat Less Great Warrior, and the winner takes all. All the grunts just sit by and watch, quietly, for their leader to die. TV Tropes calls this “Combat by champion”: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CombatByChampion
Does this ever happen in real life? Are battles or wars ever resolved by one-on-one duels?
The wikipedia article mentions some non-mythological examples, though most of them are described generally rather than citing specific examples. Seems to have been fairly common (or at least not uncommon) in more than one culture, though.
Short answer, maybe 400 years ago.
The Real Life tab on your cited page lists a couple of (dubious) examples.
It is credible that (soon to be) King William I may have personally dispatched King Harold II, in what was the decisive moment of the Battle of Hastings. However this would not have been single combat: William would’ve been mounted as the Norman knights fought at this point, whereas Harold like the other English soldiers would’ve been on foot. Also William would’ve been leading a small retinue of knights (3 other knights) and even if we take this account as true (whilst it is seen by some as the most convincing account of King Harold’s death, it is hardly beyond doubt) it still can’t be said with any certainty that William struck the fatal blow.
I’ve heard that William and his lads all hacked Harold to pieces pretty much together. The account was later retconned by Williams spin doctors to read that William beat him in single combat. They also downplayed the part about Harold being blind at the time due to AN ARROW IN HIS EYE.
What? He had two of them.
Single combat between champions was common during the Byzantine era, and maybe throughout the rest of history as well, but I don’t know if it decided any battles. Supposedly it did at the Battle of Nineveh, but apparently that comes from a historian writing 100 years after the battle. In the battles of Taginae and Dara, single combat was used to pass the time before the real battle.
The Romans had the “spolia opima,” the highest honor a general could earn. It was the “ultimate spoils” of war that a Roman general took from an opposing general after defeating them in single combat. It only happened 3 times, and only one seems to have won the battle. Supposedly Aulus Cornelius Cossus killed Lar Tolumnius, put his head on a pike and paraded it in front of the enemy, who retreated in horror.
That’s always been my take on it, too. But all the accounts I’ve read stress that Harold was blinded by an arrow.
Harold was quoted by the media as stating “Tis but a scratch.”