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Hostages in the Middle Ages (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,673
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Hostages in the Middle Ages (Hardcover)
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In medieval Europe hostages were given, not taken. They were a
means of guarantee used to secure transactions 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 the modern
variety of hostageship that was addressed by the Nuremberg
tribunals and the United Nations in the twentieth century.
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