Hostages in the Middle Ages / Adam J. Kosto.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kosto, Adam J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hostages--Europe--History--To 1500.

International relations--History--To 1500.

Political kidnapping--Europe--History--To 1500.

Diplomacy--History--To 1500.

Political culture--Europe--History--To 1500.

Political culture.

History.

Diplomacy.

Political kidnapping.

International relations.

Hostages.

Europe.

Physical Description:

xv, 281 pages : maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2012.

Summary:

In medieval Europe hostages were given, not taken. They were a means of guarantee used to secure agreements ranging from treaties to wartime commitments to financial transactions. In principle, the force of the guarantee lay in the threat to the life of the hostage if the agreement were broken, but, while violation of agreements was common, execution of hostages was a rarity. Medieval hostages are thus best understood not as simple pledges, but as a political institution characteristic of the medieval millennium, embedded in its changing historical contexts.

In the Early Middle Ages, hostageship was principally seen in warfare and diplomacy, operating within structures of kinship and practices of alliance characteristic of elite political society. From the eleventh century hostageship diversified, despite the spread of a legal and financial culture that would seem to have made it superfluous. Hostages in the Middle Ages traces the development of this institution from Late Antiquity through the period of the Hundred Years War, across Europe and the Mediterranean World. It explores - the logic of agreements, the identity of hostages, and the conditions of their confinement, while shedding light on a wide range of subjects, from sieges and treaties, to captivity and ransom, to the Peace of God and the Crusades, to the rise of towns and representation, to political communication and shifting gender dynamics. The book closes by examining the reasons for the decline of hostageship in the Early Modern era, and the rise of the modern variety of hostageship that was addressed by the Nuremberg tribunals and the United Nations in the twentieth century. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Hostages in the Middle Ages: Problems and Perspectives 1

A Very Short History of Hostages 2

Hostages and Historians 5

Finding Hostages in the Medieval Sources 9

Outline 19

2 Varieties and Logics of Medieval Hostageship 24

Varieties of Hostageship 24

The Logics of Hostageship 34

Hostages and the Theory of Contracts 41

Appendix: Execution of Hostages 49

3 Hostages in the Early Middle Ages: Communication, Conversion, and Structures of Alliance 53

Hostages and Political Communication 55

The Wider Impact of Hostage Agreements 61

The Fate of Hostages: Three Episodes 62

Early Medieval Hostageship in Context 68

4 Hostages in the Later Middle Ages: Representation, Finance, and the Laws of War 78

Female Hostages 83

Hostages as Representatives 92

Hostages and the Laws of War 99

Conditional Respite 99

Conditional Release and Ransom 110

Financial Transactions and the Development of Rules 121

5 Conditional Hostages 130

Peace Texts 132

The Earliest Conditional Hostages 135

International Treaties 148

Hostages for Monetary Debts 157

6 The King's Ransom 163

Captive Crusader Kings: Baldwin II of Jerusalem (1123) and Louis IX of France (1250) 166

Richard I of England (Treaty of Worms, 1193) 171

Charles II of Naples (Treaty of Canfranc, 1288) 177

David II of Scotland (Treaty of Berwick, 1357) 182

James I of Scotland (Treaty of London, 1424) 192

7 Hostageship Interpreted, from the Middle Ages to the Age of Terrorism 199

Medieval Views of Hostageship 200

From Vitoria to Nuremberg and Beyond 214.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [227]-259) and index.

ISBN:

9780199651702

0199651701

OCLC:

778325914