Download PDF | (Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions. Medieval and Early Modern Peoples, 10) Yvonne Friedman - Encounter Between Enemies_ Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem-Brill Academic Pub (2002).
273 Pages
PREFACE
In October 1986, Ron Arad, a navigator from the Israeli airforce, was taken captive. Up until the present, no Israeli government has admitted definite failure to rescue or ransom him, but the chances of his returning alive diminish with time. I, who have never met Ron Arad and have not particularly studied his case, nonetheless see him as a symbol. The Israeli maxim of never leaving a wounded soldier on the battlefield, whatever the price, stems from the Jewish tradition of responsibility toward captives and is part of the ethos young Israelis are raised on. This tradition is so strong that there have never been any official thoughts about giving up or deciding that it is not worthwhile to try to redeem captives.
Ron Arad’s story induced me to ask myself questions about ransoming captives years ago when I first started the research for this book, making me wonder how people felt about prisoners of war in the past. What were they willing to do to release them, and how did the feelings of solidarity between fighters, if any, affect the way they fought? Although Ron is not the hero of this book, it is in a way dedicated to him and other prisoners of war and especially to all those who have not lost faith and hope and are willing to work for the release of prisoners of war, any war.
Among these are the members of the Cambridge Orthodox Synagogue who have continued to recite the prayer for the release of captives every Saturday for more than a decade, long after others lost hope. To me they are the essence of Jewish solidarity and of care and responsibility for distant members of their people.
The gates of Cambridge were opened to me by Anna and David Abulafia. Since my first visit they have both given generously of their precious time and knowledge and last, but certainly not least, their friendship. My love and gratitude go to Ron and Thelma Domb whose hospitality and friendship I have enjoyed so often, who have made their home mine. Shuli and Stephan Reif welcomed me not only to the Cairo Geniza but also to their home. I am grateful to the president and fellows of Lucy Cavendish College whose visiting scholarship gave me the compatible surroundings I find it easy to work in. The stimulating atmosphere at the college contributed much to this book. My thanks to Ruth Fluss who always makes a warm home for wayfarers and who taught me what quiet courage means.
Unfortunately, I can no longer thank my beloved and honored teacher and mentor Avrom Saltman whose memory casts a long shadow over this work. My debt to him is beyond words. The late Joshua Prawer with his boundless and contagious enthusiasm for the world of the crusades also influenced this work, although many years have passed since I had the privilege to take part in his seminars. I am indebted to Jonathan Riley-Smith for welcoming me to the crusader seminar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and the Institute of Historical Research in London. To its codirector Jonathan Philips and its members my thanks for making it an arena for testing new ideas.
‘To Dena Ordan, the English editor who has grown to be a close friend, with thanks for many shared granola bars as well as for her professional, meticulous, and patient work.
My home university, Bar-Ilan, has assisted with sabbatical leaves and scholarships: for these I thank the Research Authority, the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies, the Dr. Simon Krauthammer Chair in Archaeology, and the Department of General History. Working in two departments means carrying a double load of administrative tasks, but it also means a double number of colleagues and friends, and I have been blessed with many. My doctoral students Anat Peled, Michael Ehrlich, Simon Gat, and Yael Guter, and all the students in the crusader seminar at Bar-Ilan University have likewise challenged me to keep in touch with wider issues outside the depths of captivity.
1 am also pleased to acknowledge the generous assistance of the librarians and staff of the following institutions: Bar-Ilan University, the General Reading Room of the Jewish National and University Library, the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, the Cambridge University Library and its Geniza collection curator, the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, the British Library, the Bibliothéque nationale and C.N.R.S in Paris, the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, and the Vatican Library.
Many friends and colleagues worldwide have patiently listened to my thoughts on ransoming captives and shared their insights with me: Giulio Cipollone O.SS.T., Miri Rubin, Bat-Sheva Albert, Miryam Greilsammer, Sophia Menashe, Sylvia Schein, Abraham David, Amnon Linder, Michael Toch, and Joseph Drory have all given generously of their time and counsel. Special thanks go to Susan Edgington, who read the entire manuscript and whose sharp eye and erudite touch enhanced this book. I am profoundly indebted to her and to Esther Cohen: their support means more to me than they themselves realize and their generosity and friendship are greatly appreciated. If the final product is less than they expected, the fault is entirely my own.
Dena Ordan, Renée Melamed, Esther and Hanan Eshel, Esther Chazon, and Betsy Amaru, the ‘think tank’ of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, shared many cherished hours. Zohar Ariel from Haifa University also extended a helping hand and heart.
Finally I wish to thank Julian Deahl of Brill for his patience and encouragement.
My loyal and encouraging family members have lived in the shadow of medieval captivity for many years. Without their patience this book could never have been written, and without their impatience it might never have been finished. I dedicate this book to Zvi, who fought along with me on many battlefields. What is mine and yours is his (Nedarim 50a).
INTRODUCTION
Prisoners of war are not heroes. They are by definition failures, whether soldiers vanquished in battle or civilians unable to defend their homes. The alteration in status from a free to a powerless person is the first and critical phase of captivity; even a well-treated captive usually loses his former rank and status and his life is at the captor’s mercy.' It may therefore seem strange to make the captive the focus of a monograph, particularly if the period under study is one when physical prowess and chivalry were central social ideals, and not just in times of warfare. In medieval society the warrior was a focal element and the economic infrastructure was geared to support him and enable him to fulfill his vocation, i.e., to fight. The warrior fought for power, property, and prestige and if he failed he lost all three.? This was true for medieval society at large, and even more so during the Crusades, a period replete with gestes — heroic and romantic deeds. Crusader society saw war not as a necessary evil, but as a holy task laid upon it by God and the Church, and the status of the warrior was enhanced accordingly.
‘The captive in such a period was the classic antihero, the failed warrior. This book’s protagonists are, however, not only the captives, but also the society from which they came, or more precisely the warring Christian and Muslim societies. The determining criterion for making these societies the focal subject matter is their respective conduct toward captives. In essence, our main question is: how did these rival societies react to the fact that many of their members did not leave the battlefield as victorious heroes, and did not die martyrs’ deaths, but remained alive as vanquished captives and had to be dealt with one way or another? This question in turn leads to more detailed queries: was there any correlation between the way one behaved toward one’s captives, that is, toward enemy warriors who fell into one’s hands, and willingness to take responsibility for one’s own captives, that is, former comrades now in enemy hands?
We must inquire in addition if the meeting of enemies away from the battlefield led to more peaceful encounters between them. Did the need to deal with an unknown enemy on his home territory in order to free one’s captives influence the relations between enemies? Did the belligerent sides learn modes of behavior and ethics from their adversaries? Or did they remain two totally divorced alien forces, untouched by each other’s culture and mores? Did the norms and readiness to take responsibility for the vanquished soldiers one had sent into battle develop during two hundred years of almost constant warfare? What was the role of religion as a restraint upon the atrocities of war? What contribution did chivalrous ideals make to the everyday conduct of war? All these questions must be addressed in order to understand the complex problem of captivity in the entangled net of relationships between the adversaries.
The basis for a humane attitude toward prisoners of war, the restraint of the victors’ wrath visited on the vanquished, ostensibly stems from a set of values that honors the human rights of the enemy. Such values could be based on natural moral feelings, or on. religious laws, or on ethics based on social conventions, which in the medieval context would be identified as chivalrous ideals. We shall see that no set of norms was strong enough to protect the lives of captives under all circumstances, although all of them contributed to the creation of an accepted mode of conduct.
Religious value
In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the attitude toward captives from one’s own camp seems to be based mainly on social conventions and on concepts of religious charity (Tsedaka, Sadaga, Caritas). All three traditions saw the ransom of captives as a meritorious deed of charity rather than as the moral obligation of the leaders who sent the soldiers to war. As a religious act one would expect to find it as a scriptural precept. However, none of the basic law books of the three religions our protagonists represent explicitly mentions ransom of one’s captives as a religious duty. The paramount importance of ransom in Judaism is not grounded in the Bible, and the Qur’an mainly treats behavior toward captives taken as booty in war.
The most explicit biblical reference to captives is found in the pericope of how to treat a woman taken captive in war (Deut. 21:10-15), i.e., how to behave toward the ‘other’. Biblical law sought to restrict the possibility of abuse by mandating that the captor allow such a captive a month-long mourning period for her family and by forbidding him to sell her as a slave if he no longer desires her. The biblical lawgiver apparently found it more expedient to restrain the victorious captor, and especially in the case of the more exposed and fragile female captive, than to deal with the need to ransom one’s defeated comrades. One possible explanation for this might be that biblical law deals mainly with the victorious warrior, as if defeat were unthinkable for the Israelites. On the other hand, in the curses placed before the Israelites at the covenant, defeat and exile are main themes, and captivity is referred to explicitly. One is left with the feeling that captivity was an irremediable curse.’ As one could not expect the enemy to be merciful, the main emphasis was on self-restraint and not on charitable efforts to redeem one’s own captives. This may explain why ransom of captives is not directly mentioned in the Pentateuch and not counted as one of its basic precepts. Nonetheless, postbiblical Jewish traditions defined ransom as ‘a major precept’.”
Ransom of captives in Christianity is based on the Jewish tradition, with particular emphasis on charity. The charitable visitor of a prisoner is, as in other cases of charitable deeds, visiting Christ himself.’ Sometimes referred to as one of the seven good works expected of a pious Christian,® the need to ransom captives is not mentioned in the New Testament, possibly because warfare was not a main theme.® Not so the Qur’an, which emphasizes jihad (holy war) as one of the religious duties of a Muslim. But even in the Qur’an stress is placed on the division of booty and on behavior toward captives taken in battle, not on helping one’s own captives."" We can probably attribute this lacuna to unwillingness to dwell on defeat. War fought in the name of God is supposed to lead to victory. Despite the lack of an explicit command in their Scriptures, for medieval Judaism and Islam alike ransoming of captives was an important charitable deed, an individual as well as a communal obligation. When the chronicler Ibn al-Athir lamented the death of Saladin’s secretary Qadi Fadhil (abd-Arrahym) in 1200 he described him as “a pious man, a great distributor of alms who accomplished many acts of devotion. He founded religious foundations for alms and ransoming captives and went on pilgrimage to Mecca.” '' Ransoming captives thus equaled the Hag as a sign of piety.
While the early Christian church in the West apparently saw ransom as an important charity and was willing to contribute to its fulfillment," the duty of the individual was not as clear or well defined as in Islam and Judaism.'* Medieval Latin lexicons do not mention ransom as one of the obvious examples of caritas or eleemosyna from which we may infer that it was not among the most common means of charity.'* It was seen as an attribute of sanctity, a great deed performed by holy bishops, that is, as part of the institutional responsibility of the Church, rather than one of its parishioners’ duties. In the medieval age charity was often pursued for the associated prestige it conferred on the donor. Ransoming captives probably did not fit this definition, as the captives themselves were viewed as shameful failures. The feeling of shame and ignominy connected to captivity appears to have been universal."
In a recent interview on Israeli television (20 September 1999) a group of former captives from the Yom Kippur War (1973) were asked about their first reaction to captivity. Almost all of them answered, twenty-six years after the event, that the main and initial reaction was one of shame. This feeling was later mixed with strong feelings of anger, both because of the difficult conditions in captivity and the sense that they had been abandoned by the state, although in fact it ransomed them all. Both emotions, shame at having been taken captive and frustration at not being rescued, are grounded in the social conventions of the society that sent them to war. Similar reactions may be found in the crusader period. In Amia Lieblich’s interviews of POWs she points out that they tried to overcome their feelings of shame by emphasizing the inevitability of their capture. However, feelings of shame lingered:'* “Only many years later, during our interviews, did the men reveal these pervasive self-doubts, and admit that being captured is not a great honor for a soldier.”"”
Another prevalent reaction cited by the modern captives was the feeling of being emotionally handicapped as a result of captivity. ‘The ensuing psychological impairment brought with it problems of insomnia, nightmares, and the inability to form lasting relation-ships. Some even described feeling detached from reality. Whereas we are unlikely to find this kind of documentation for the crusader period, it may be useful to use modern reports and insights to understand the medieval protagonists, albeit exercising due caution. Reynald of Chatillon has often been described as a ruthless, irresponsible fighter who was to blame for breaking the truce in 1187 and ultimately causing the Battle of Hattin and the fall of the Latin Kingdom." His aggressive behavior is not usually connected with the well-known fact that he spent fifteen years in captivity." He reminds me of the modern navigator Gur Israeli, who after being released from Egyptian captivity in 1973 decided to go back to flying and eventually became a fighter pilot.
Of the group of aforementioned captives he alone claimed that he had no ongoing problems associated with captivity. Perhaps the return to active fighting was a way to combat the ghosts from captivity and Reynald’s belligerent irresponsibility and aggressiveness should be seen as a reaction to his experiences as a captive.” Although this proposed explanation does not add to or change the known facts, it may help us to understand an enigmatic and central figure in the drama of 1187 and the years leading up to this decisive defeat.
A different process took place in the case of Raymond III of ‘Tripoli, who was in captivity for eight years. Like the modern victim of kidnapping Patty Hearst, he identified with and became close to his captors. The dovish policies he pursued after his return, seen by his contemporaries as treason, may have been the result of his experiences in captivity.” This is the other side of the coin of the captivity phenomenon.
The story of ransoming captives in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem is based on a central narrative that sees the encounter between the enemies — Crusaders and Muslims — primarily through Christian eyes. Of course, Muslim documents will be consulted, but the perspective is mainly from the vantage point of the crusading society, as this society underwent a process of change. Having said this, I propose that some major changes in the conduct of the Franks in the Latin East stem from the influence of the Muslim enemy. Direct contact away from the battlefield and at the negotiating table led to a confrontation with different modes of behavior and mores, which had future implications for the development of rules of war that differed from former usage.
The narrative is only partly chronological. Taking the basic view that there is a progression, I shall try to show that the crusaders’ attitude changed from one of unwillingness to ransom captives and take responsibility for one’s failures to a gradual learning to cope with the problem, mainly by adopting ways already known in the East. From the first encounters in 1095 to 1101 until the gradual change during the second and third generations of settlers in the Latin Kingdom, a transformation is discernible. The great watershed seems to have been the Battle of Hattin in 1187, When almost the entire fighting force of the Latin Kingdom fell into captivity, the image of captivity was bound to change. The captive could no longer be seen as a lonely failure, one who had to fend for himself to be redeemed. Captivity became a societal (one could almost say ‘national’) phenomenon and had to be dealt with at the international level of the papacy as well as by the relatively few noncaptive survivors who started the difficult process of building the Second Crusader Kingdom from Tyre and Acre.
The Third Crusade laid the basis for the Second Kingdom of Jerusalem strategically, but also brought in newcomers whose encounters with the East led them to restart the process of acculturation from scratch. This kingdom, even more than the First, was connected by an umbilical cord to the western European reservoir that could contribute new crusaders and settlers to the shrinking land. This period saw the institutionalization of ransom. Starting with the Trinitarian Order, the papacy and the European states took an active role in organizing ransom and formulating rules of war. These rules eventually ripened into the full-fledged European sets of laws formulated in the fourteenth century, for example, The Trees of Battle.
But the narrative is never a straightforward linear chronological story. The intermingling between East and West, the confrontational encounters by ever new crusaders with the Eastern situation, brought many exceptions to the rules. It is also clear that no distinct line demarcates East/Muslim from West/Christian. The crusading experience was enacted at different meeting points and the Levant was one of many battlefields. An important point of comparison is the progress of the Spanish Reconquista, which shares many similarities with the crusade in the Latin East. But in Spain the tempo of change was very different. Spain was not just another “honorary oriental land, which had somehow got washed up on the wrong shore of the Mediterranean”.” In the sphere of ransoming captives Spain took the lead. While it took the crusaders in the East almost two centuries to arrive at an institutionalized resolution for the problems of captives, the contacts between enemies in Spain seem to have borne fruit much earlier in the tradition of municipal ransoming of captives. The redemptionist orders — Mercederian, ‘Trinitarian, and the Order of Santiago — flourished in Spain, but they never achieved the same prominence in the Latin Kingdom. If the existence of laws of war is a criterion for viewing a country as Mediterranean, Spain would indeed merit a place of honor.
A significant subtheme is the Jewish role in the development of ransoming captives. This is not because the Jews were an important factor in the warfare in the East. They were not. As nonparticipants in Muslim-Christian fighting, though often caught in its midst, they had to develop efficient modes of ransom much earlier than the crusaders did. The Cairo Geniza provides a type of documentation of everyday life lacking in the chronicles and documents of the main protagonists, and therefore materials from the Geniza acquire disproportional importance.
The sources for our investigation are mainly literary — chronicles and histories of the period. There are several charters that can help us to achieve a picture of the practicalities of ransom, showing how money was raised and what sums were at stake. Ransom of captives receives mention as a charity in a few testaments. But basically the writers’ negative concept of captivity leads to very little being written about it in record sources. Although we know that the military orders played a role in ransoming captives and in negotiating for their ransom, the subject is almost absent from their statutes and charters. There is very little to compare with the rich sources found in the Geniza which acquaint us not only with personalities dealing with ransom, some of them very prominent leaders, but also with prices and the everyday vicissitudes and problems of the returning captives. Occasionally a knight impoverished by the burden of ransom would sell his manor to an ecclesiastical institution, which has preserved their charters in their archives, but such cases provide very few glimpses into the problems of captivity and ransom.
The legal sources are not very rich either. At the end of the eleventh century the laws of war were in the process of emerging from the realm of undefined custom to regulated usage. Only in the thirteenth century do we find some attempts to codify the problems of captivity. This leaves us mainly with the chronicles and histories written by contemporaries or near contemporaries of the Franks in the Latin East. Because the Crusades were seen as a pivotal event in the history of humankind and Christianity, we have many such sources. These are complemented by chansons de geste, epic cycles whose main theme is the crusaders and their deeds. The line between history, romance, and poetry is not a clearly demarcated one, and purely literary descriptions are sometimes a useful means of gaining insight into the mentality of the age. However, all three kind of narrative sources — chronicle, romance, and chanson — have as their aim to tell the story of the heroes of the crusader movement, among whom captives allegedly had no place.
We must also distinguish between two different kinds of captives, namely those who fought and lost their freedom on the battlefield and civilians reduced to captivity by conquest. During the First Crusade this line of demarcation was blurred, as the noncombatants, including women and children, were part of the itinerant camp and never far from the actual battlefield. These noncombatants were part of the crusader camp besieging Antioch and other cities. Only after the establishment of the Latin Kingdom, however tiny and fragile at the start, does the division between combatants and noncombatants acquire any meaning, Thereafter, the difference between active fighters and civilians caught in a raid or siege may have been more clear-cut.
We shall see, however, that it was the social division between captives, between the higher and lower echelons of society, that was most significant, and not that between combatants and noncombatants. Women dominate the latter group, although there are some documented cases of fighting crusader women. In general, women were more likely to be spared and taken captive than men. Therefore a discrepancy exists between their marginal role in fighting and their large representation among the captives. Moreover, although women were more likely to be taken captive than men, the literary chansons, such as Les Chétifs, make the male captive the hero of the narrative. Captive women are relegated to the sphere of romantic fantasies of sexual conquest. This connection between captivity and sexual relations makes the return of female captives even more problematic than that of men, as it was taken for granted that their captivity included sexual harassment, and they were thus considered morally tainted.
Examining the crusaders and the Franks in the Latin East as a ‘society organized for war’, it is possible to discern several stages of development in their dealings with captivity and ransom. When the crusaders set out their basic conception seems to have been disregard of captivity as a possible outcome of crusade. Confronted with an unexpected reality, their first reaction was a complete refusal to deal with the problems that grew out of such encounters with their enemies. Later, when forced to reevaluate the situation, we can discern a softening of their former opposition. The need to confront a new situation was dealt with as a group, firstly because the ties of the individual crusader with his former group, e.g., Lotharingians, Provengals, etc., were at this point still very strong,” and secondly because diplomatic dealings with the enemy were the leadership's responsibility. Thus the individual crusaders had to learn to behave as part of the great enterprise and, at the same time, if taken captive, they were at first left to deal with the situation without much real support from their group. Only when great leaders were taken captive do we see the development of the group responsibility toward the individual captive.
Last, as part of the process of absorbing the norms of the East, Frankish society gradually learned to deal with the complexities arising from the need to encounter the enemy away from the battlefield. This led to more frequent captive exchanges, to the establishment of new ways of ransom, to the perception of the problem at the group level, and finally to the formulation of rules of war. The process of turning from a crusading society into a Latin Kingdom made it imperative to act vis-a-vis the realities in that land. The newly learned norms were elsewhere distilled into written laws. In the Latin Kingdom the stages of conforming to the norms and developing them into written law were not attained. Partly this was because each new generation of crusaders from the West had to start the process of acculturation afresh, and partly because the kingdom did not exist long enough to complete the process. We can only speculate what direction the Latin Kingdom would have taken had it been allowed to remain on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
One model for small group development posits the following sequence of development: forming, storming, norming, and performing.” Although formulated to explain the stages of development in small task-oriented groups, this model may be relevant to the stages of a large group with a long, indefinite group life like the crusaders, or indeed of fighting societies at large. Each new wave of crusaders arriving from the West had to go through the different stages as they came to take part in the tasks of crusade and possible settlement. Moreover, the encounter was never between two static groups. The newcomers had to deal both with an alien Muslim society and a Latin society in the stage of forming. If the crusaders seem mainly to have been storming, the constant fluctuation of their society both in Europe and in the East may have been one of the reasons. Some lessons were learned. One possible outcome of this adversarial encounter may have been the formulation by European society of clear rules of warfare after the fall of the Latin Kingdom. These laws of war included prescriptions governing behavior toward captives, rules of ransom, and restraint in battle.
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