There can be no doubt that late Romans were regularly captured and enslaved by barbarians along all their frontiers. the problem occurred on a scale far greater than the sources might suggest. an inscription found in augsburg in 1992 illustrates the problem, for it records a raid by the luthungi deep into Roman Italy in the winter of 259/60 that carried off “many thousands of Italian captives” but was eventually stopped by a Roman general near the Lech in April 260. Prior to the discovery of the inscription, we had only the vaguest idea that there ever was such an incursion and no reports of the capture of thousands.588 indeed, extant sources are so patchy that they could report only a fraction of the problem. Nevertheless the tale they tell is harrowing. To get an impression, one may think of Ammianus watching tens of thousands of Roman captives paraded past the walls of Amida by Shapur H in 359; or of the Quadi and sarmatian raids into pannonia he reports for 374 during which the princess Constantia, granddaughter of Constantine, narrowly escaped capture.589 Military defeats at the hands of barbarian peoples generally led to mass enslavements, as when Gaiseric’s rout of aspar during the Vandal takeover of Africa in 431 resulted in the capture of thousands, including the future emperor Marcian, or when the Hunnic invasion of Anatolia and the Levant in 395 occasioned the enslavement of 18,000.590 Often entire cities were enslaved: Attila carried off inhabitants from Ratiaria, Naissus, Philippopolis, Arcadiopolis, Constantia, and most other fortified cities of Thrace in the 440s; and the Avars enslaved Singidunum and Anchialus in the mid-580s.591 The Persians had a particular penchant for the capture, deportation, and resettlement of cities, territories, and armies, as when Shapur 1 captured over seventy towns and cities and deported their populations between 256 and 260, or when Kavad I took the population of Amida in 503, and Khosrau 1 the populations of Sura, Antioch, Beroea, Apamea, Callincum, and Batnae in 540.592
The fact is that, for most barbarian societies, slave raiding was both a political and economic strategy. This is well illustrated in an incident from Gregory’s Historiae that reports how, in 532, when Theuderic refused to march on Burgundy with Lothar and Childebert, his Frankish troops nearly revolted until he won them back by promising to lead them instead against Clermont-Ferrand where “they had his permission to bring home with them not only every single thing which they could steal in the region that they were about to attack but also the entire population.”593 Control of the Gefolgschaft thus entailed, at least in part, the acquisition and redistribution of human capital. Raiding for Roman captives also was regularly used by barbarian groups, Germanic and otherwise, as a political tool to punish the imperial government for perceived slights. Gaiseric raided Italian coastal towns for captives in revenge for the failure of Valentinian HI and Aetius to render property he felt was owed him after Hermanaric’s marriage to Eudocia; in like fashion the Ghassanid prince al-Nu‘man raided the eastern frontier ca. 582 for captives in revenge for the capture of his father al-Mundhir.594
Particularly lucrative for barbarians were those high-prestige, high-status captives whose relatives were willing to ransom them at all costs. The wife of a certain Syllus, captured by the Huns in Ratiaria in 449, was ransomed by her husband for 500 solidi, 25 times the average price of a slave in Late Antiquity, and in 474 the magister militum Heracleius was ransomed from Theodoric the Ostrogoth by his relatives for 100 talents.595 596 In several sermons from the end of his life, Augustine discusses ransoms paid to redeem captives from the Vandals as if these were a common and cripplingly expensive part of life for well-heeled North Africans.11 Although most families were unable to afford such sums, it appears that late Romans, like the eighteenth-century English gentlemen, also assembled ransoms collectively. Procopius tells us that the citizens of Edessa and Carrhae amassed great hoards in a vain effort to ransom the citizens of Antioch in 540.597 Moreover, powerful individuals from Melania the Younger to the empress Flacilla were eager to loosen their purse-strings on behalf of the masses of captives.598
When possible, well-connected family and friends were enlisted to expedite negotiations and, with luck, curb expenses. Ennodius of Pavia thus worked his connections with the patrician and praetorian prefect Liberius in an effort to win the release of his relative Camella from captivity in Gaul. He also exploited his contacts withAvitus ofAquileia for the release ofthe brother ofhis friend Bonifatius, held captive in that city.599 similarly, avitus of Vienne opened negotiations with Maximus, bishop of pavia, for the release of a boy named AvuIus, held captive by the ostrogoths for four years, at the request of the boy’s father.600 powerful friends could not, however, always keep expenses down, as Ruricius of Limoges’ friend Possessor revealed, for though Possessor’s fortunes had once matched his name, he had gone bankrupt ransoming his own brother.601
Ennodius, Avitus, and Ruricius were, of course, all bishops, figures whose growing stature in Late Antiquity rendered them important power brokers in the business of ransoming. This was true from the early third century, when Cyprian of Carthage first recognized the ransom of captives from barbarians as an act of corporal mercy.602 In the fourth century, bishops across the empire became involved in ransoming captives, most famous among them Ambrose, who, in 379, melted down sacred vessels from his church to ransom Romans recently ensnared following the Gothic invasion of Thrace and Ulyricum. Naturally this charitable act elicited derision from his Arian opponents, not without reason.603 In a fine article on Caesarius of Arles’ activities in this arena, Klingshirn has shown how Caesarius liquidated church assets and assembled donations for ransoms not just to exercise his charity toward fellow citizens of Arles and other Christians, but to extend his ecclesiastical patronage over external, barbarian, sometimes even pagan communities.604 To be sure, such bishops were reacting to the political chaos and military violence of their age with a legitimate form of pastoral care. Because, however, they also were broadening their power base—and in the process destroying sacred, and often very valuable endowments—they necessarily drew fire from their opponents. For precisely this reason, a series of laws and canons from the sixth century onward regulated tightly the liquidation of church property for such purposes.605
As in the case of the English sailors from the Inspector, the redemption or ransoming of late ancient captives also was a regular subject of delicate negotiations between Romans and barbarians. When the alamannic chief Vadomarius came to terms with Julian in 359, the emperor demanded the return of all Romans captured by the alamanni. To ensure full compliance, Julian assembled a full roster of 3,000 names to be checked against those returned.606 the parties to peace negotiations often attempted to avoid the necessity of ransoming in the first place, as when Jovian negotiated the surrender of the fortresses Nisibis and singara in 363 minus their inhabitants, or when the magister militum Theognis convinced the Avar khan Baian to accept the surrender of Sirmium without its denizens ca. 582.607 The problem of war captives as a subject of negotiation of course cut both ways. Alaric, for example, first demanded the return of all slaves of barbarian origin as a precondition of lifting his siege of Rome in 408.608 equally delicate were negotiations between different barbarian kingdoms over hostages, as when in 495 Theodoric sent Epifanius of Pavia to engage Gundobad, king of the Burgundians, in sensitive discussions for the ransom of 6,000 Ligurians captured ca. 491. Unable at the time to retake the captives by force and constrained by straitened circumstances to provide little in the way of ransom money, Theodoric eventually offered his daughter in marriage to Gundobad’s son and, probably, a vague and ultimately hollow promise of a share in the inheritance rights to the Ostrogothic kingdom.609 Given that money was being weighed out against human lives, it is little wonder that the arrangement of ransoms was a contentious issue, often demanded concessions from both sides, and, as in the story of the Inspector, regularly broke down.610 Priscus’ famous embassy to the court of Attila in 449 eventually foundered in large part on the question of captives.611
Priscus’ embassy confirms yet another commonality with the English captives in Morocco, the tendency for some prisoners simply to go native. Among Priscus’ most interesting acquaintances during his journey was a trader from Viminacium who had been taken prisoner by the Hunnic leader Onegesius, whom he had served faithfully and by whom he was eventually freed. After manumission, he married a Hunnic wife and became a wealthy freedman who readily sprang to the defense of the Hunnic lifestyle in a lengthy diatribe before Priscus.612 Nor was he unusual: Gregory Thaumaturgus indicates that many had joined the Goths during their raids on central Anatolia in the 260s and became so thoroughly barbarized that they renounced their past and willingly executed Roman prisoners;613 and the Gauls of the mid-fifth century, Salvian reports, gladly supported their barbarian captors against their former Roman overlords.614 Little wonder, then, that a law of 366 on postliminium—the legal right to return to citizenship and property after foreign captivity—explicitly denies this right to those who willingly fled to or remained with barbarians longer than necessary.615
Priscus’ embassy to the Huns also evinces one final commonality with our English captives, the role of exoticism in increasing the value of outsiders and thus raising the stakes in their capture. Among the curiosities witnessed by Priscus
While at the Hunnic royal court was a certain Zercon, a black African slave with a physical deformity who was eventually captured by the Huns and wound up in the hands of Attila’s brother, Bleda. Zercon was kept as a court jester, a sort of golliwog mutant whose incongruity in central Europe made him a rare prize.616 Exoticism also boosted the erotic value of captives. Fowden, for example, has recently argued that the bathing beauty portrayed in the frescoes at the Umayyad palace of Qusayr ‘Amra was the captive Sasanian princess Shah-1 Afdd, daughter of Yazdigird III (632-651), who was captured and eventually offered to the caliph al-Walid 1. 1n the fresco, on the wall of al-Walid’s palace, the artist simultaneously exposes the girl’s naked beauty, subtly reveals her exoticism and captivity, and throws into relief her master’s dominion not just over her as subject but also over her father the foreign potentate.617
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