Captivity

Capture by the enemy was a perennial danger during crusade expeditions as well as during fighting between Latin Christians and their various opponents in Outremer, Greece, Spain, and the Baltic lands, a danger that affected fighters and noncombatants of both sexes and of all social groups. Captivity came to be an important theme of crusading literature, notably in the form of the Old French epic Les Chetifs, and it eventually led to the creation of Christian religious institutions established specifically for the liberation of prisoners.

In eleventh - and twelfth-century Western warfare, class consciousness and economic self-interest meant that captured knights were often spared and ransomed, while captured foot soldiers and noncombatants were frequently massacred. In the Muslim world, captives might be ransomed, exchanged, or enslaved, and large-scale prisoner exchanges had been common between Byzantine and Arab armies. During the First Crusade (1096-1099), however, there seems to have been little expectation that captives would be spared, and execution was the usual fate of those taken in battle by both Christians and Muslims.

In Outremer such attitudes meant that the Franks often carried out large-scale and savage massacres of the inhabitants of captured cities, such as Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man (1098), Jerusalem (1099), and Caesarea (1101), while they were reluctant to pay ransoms demanded by the Muslims. From around 1105, however, it became more common for captives on both sides to be spared, especially when they could be used to obtain large ransoms or for prisoner exchanges, although the inability to meet ransom demands, along with the reluctance of Muslims to release key enemies, often meant that prominent Franks spent lengthy periods in captivity. These included the following (with periods of captivity in parentheses): Bohe-mund I (1100-1103) and Bohemund III of Antioch (11641165), Baldwin II of Edessa and Jerusalem (1104-1108, 1123-1124), Joscelin I (1104-1107) and Joscelin II of Edessa (1150-1159), Raymond III of Tripoli (1164-1173), and Rey-nald of Chatillon (1160/1161-1175, 1187). The intensification of warfare in the time of Saladin led to increasingly harsh treatment of captives, as exemplified by Saladin’s execution of Templar and Hospitaller knights after the battle of Hattin (1187) and the massacre of several thousand Muslims ordered by Richard the Lionheart after the surrender of Acre (1191).

For captives on either side, freedom might come about by various means. Escape or rescue was frequently a possibility, and some rescue attempts might involve complex or large-scale efforts, as when Armenians from Edessa infiltrated the Turkish fortress of Khartput disguised as monks and traders to rescue Baldwin II (1123), or when the Franco-Lombard contingent during the Crusade of 1101 turned aside from its march route in a vain attempt to rescue Bohemund I of Antioch in northern Anatolia. Liberation was more commonly secured by ransom or exchange for captives freed by the other side. Even lords might need to sell or mortgage considerable property to raise ransoms, or might demand payments from their vassals, but enslavement was often the fate of those without sufficient resources. Liberation through apostasy, that is conversion to the faith of the captors, was often offered under duress, as an alternative to death, and such a conversion usually meant that the convert was unable to return to his former home. The Templars and Hospitallers generally refused to ransom any of their knight brethren who were captured, although they were often prepared to put up funds to free laypeople.

The great number of Christian fighters and noncombatants taken prisoner by Saladin at Hattin and afterward brought about a new focus in the West on the plight of captives and the need for their liberation. On the initiative of the papacy, prayers for Christian captives were introduced into the liturgy, while new institutions were founded with the purpose of redeeming captives. Although military orders in both Outremer and Iberia had previously been active in this respect, the work of redemption was given a new basis in 1198 with the foundation of the Trinitarian Order, whose principal objective was the liberation of captives by the provision of ransoms as an act of charity. Although the Trinitarians were active in the Holy Land, it was Spain and the western Mediterranean region that came to be the main sphere of their own and other redemptionist activity, particularly after the foundation of a second dedicated redemptionist order, the Mercedarians (1223), based primarily in Iberia and Languedoc. Redemptionist work extended not only to captives taken in the wars of the Reconquista, but also to the many Christians carried off by the corsairs of North Africa. For Muslims too, the liberation of prisoners was regarded as a meritorious act, and wealthy individuals often donated money directly for redemptions or for charitable foundations established for this purpose.

The failure of many crusades after 1187 often resulted in large-scale captures of Christians. Thus Louis IX of France and his men were obliged to surrender to the Egyptians, after being outmaneuvered during their advance on Cairo, and were obliged to pay a colossal ransom (1250); after the disastrous defeat of Nikopolis at the hands of the Turks (1396), the majority of Christian captives were systematically butchered, with some being sold into slavery, and a few nobles spared for heavy ransom. Even a crusader returning home was not immune to capture, as in the case of Richard the Lionheart, seized by Duke Leopold V of Austria on his journey back from the Third Crusade and held for ransom for 100,000 marks by the emperor Henry VI (1192).

Cruelty to captives was a particular feature of the Christian conquest of Prussia and Livonia; it was common for prisoners on both sides to be butchered or burned alive on the field of battle. However, from the later thirteenth century there was a growing tendency to treat captives on this front as an important economic resource, particularly to replenish working populations that had been depleted through continual warfare. Many of the numerous raids by Christians and pagans alike during the later Baltic crusades were mounted with the express purpose of obtaining captives who could be enslaved and set to work in the fields or in the construction of fortifications.

-Alan V. Murray

Bibliography

Brodman, James W., Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Cipollone, Giulio, Cristianita-Islam: Cattivita e liberazione in nome di Dio (Roma: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, 1992).

Ekdahl, Sven, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War during the Fighting between the Teutonic Order and Lithuania,” in The Military Orders: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, ed. Malcolm Barber (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994), pp. 263-269.

Forey, Alan J., “The Military Orders and the Ransoming of Captives from Islam (Twelfth to Early Fourteenth Centuries),” Studia Monastica 33 (1991), 259-279.

Friedman, Yvonne, Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

Hillenbrand, Carole, “The Imprisonment of Reynald of Chatillon,” in Texts, Documents and Artefacts: Islamic Studies in Honour of D. S. Richards, ed. Chase F. Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 79-101.

Lev, Yaacov, “Prisoners of War during the Fatimid-Ayyubid Wars with the Crusaders,” in Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades, ed. Michael Gervers and James M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 11-27.

La Liberazione dei “Captivi” tra Cristianita e Islam, ed. Giulio Cipollone (Citta del Vaticano: Archivio Segreta Vaticano, 2000).