Book Review: Hostages in the Middle Ages by Adam J. Kosto

Nowadays, at least in Western countries, taking a hostage is regarded as a barbaric act, the seizure of an innocent individual in order to force an enemy to agree to a course of action such as liberating prisoners. Such acts were explicitly outlawed by international convention in 1979. But this is only one form of hostageship, which was an immensely common institution in the Middle Ages. As the author points out, hostages ‘feature in nearly every major politico-military development or event between the fifth and fifteenth centuries’ (p. 4). In this very learned book Kosto, who has already produced a considerable body of work on the subject, traces the history of this institution, its many varieties, and the changes in its nature.

For Kosto, the medieval hostage is the guarantor of an agreement who is given, albeit under varied degrees of duress, rather than taken. Because medieval states were not well defined and their competence was limited, hostages were widely used across society and in forms which reflect its changes. In chapter 2 the author establishes the wide variety of hostageship across the time period. Chapter 3 deals with Europe before ad 1000 and suggests that hostages were then symbols of status rather than guarantees. This chapter attempts to report and analyse all the cases found in our limited documentation; thereafter this becomes impossible because of the increase in source material. Chapter 4 shows how the institution spread from war and politics into the financial transactions of an increasingly complex world. Chapter 5 analyses ‘conditional hostages’, whose existence reveals the growth of governmental institutions capable, though only to a degree, of resolving disputes and generating a degree of trust between the competing parties. Chapter 6 examines the case of hostages taken for the ransom and release of captive kings, while chapter 7 takes the story up to the present day.

Perhaps the most fascinating subject which the author tackles is the survival of hostages in circumstances in which death would seem to be expectable. The example to which he returns time after time is that of William Marshal, who as a child was given by his father, John, as a hostage for his promise to hand over his castle of Newbury to King Stephen after an agreed time. In fact, John used the respite in the siege to strengthen his defences and to send for help. Stephen threatened to kill the child, and had him tied to a catapult, a perrier, which presaged a dreadful death, but could not bring himself to kill the child. Kosto points out that sparing hostages was much more the rule than killing them. This ‘mercy’ was partly the result of sympathy between high-status hostages and their captors, but it was also a blunt recognition of the simple fact that killing destroyed the whole value of the hostage. The careful scholarship with which this point is established is important to military historians who have not observed this simple fact – though, as Kosto shows, not all hostages were as lucky as William.

It is important to note that Kosto establishes that the conventions of hostageship were observed even in the circumstances of the crusades. When Baldwin II of Jerusalem was captured in 1123, negotiations for his release began immediately. After his release, Baldwin quickly reneged on his promises, using, according to one version, the excuse that the Pope would not countenance the surrender of the city of Azaz. Kosto sticks very closely and sometimes rather narrowly to his theme of hostages and rather cuts short the consequences of Baldwin’s actions, a series of complex negotiations revolving around the go-betweens, the Munqids of Shaizar, as a result of which the hostages were spared. The example of Baldwin is spectacular, but far from isolated, and this is important because too often the crusades are seen as an ideological struggle as intense as that on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Kosto here reinforces the point made by Y. Friedman, Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2002), that there were many kinds of remission in the struggle.

The assertion that in the eleventh century a new form of hostageship emerged, the seizure of an innocent individual in order to force an enemy to agree to a course of action, is, however, rather uncertain. In 1089 Normandy was disturbed by a feud between the Goël family and William of Breteuil. At first William did badly, but he built up his resources ‘with the help of ransoms of captives and plunder taken from the country people’ (Ordericus Vitalis, ed. M. Chibnall, 4.287–96). Taking whole communities hostage was always a feature of medieval warfare and it became particularly common in the Hundred Years War. This kind of hostageship is missing from Kosto’s book, and it must be said it closely resembles what he characterizes as the modern form of the practice. However, this is an excellent and closely reasoned book which casts light on a neglected and very important area of medieval life.