The Time-Honored Tradition of Ransom
Dr. Helena Schrader
Following the battle of Hattin, the knights and noblemen who had surrendered to Saladin’s forces were held for ransom and would later be released. The idea is quite alien to many modern readers, so I thought I’d step back and examine it briefly.
The concept of
ransom dates back to classical times, but during the Early Middle Ages it fell
into disuse and we hear little about ransoms. By the mid-11th
century, however, they were back in fashion, and from the mid-12th
century to the end of the 15th they were a dominant feature of
warfare. Although they have since
disappeared from Western warfare, the criminal custom of capturing people for
ransom still persists in some parts of the world such as Latin America and
Nigeria. In Western Europe, the age of ransoms was the High Middle Ages, when
ransoms constituted a fundamental component of warfare. Without them, the very
course of European history would have been different — not just because kings
like Richard I of England and John “the Good” of France might have been killed
rather than held for ransom, but because the custom of allowing a captive to
buy his freedom altered many aspects of warfare itself.
It worth noting,
however, that the tradition of ransom was strongest in France. It spread with
French influence to England and the Holy Land, but was not so well established
in the Holy Roman Empire or Iberia. Interestingly, the Saracens either had an
independent tradition of ransom (and if someone knows about this please leave a
comment!) or rapidly adopted the “Frankish” custom because it was so highly
lucrative. The Arabs were, after all, very good businessmen and traders, and
ransoms were first and foremost a financial transaction.
In the
French/English tradition, ransoms were a means of enriching oneself, and the
rules of tournaments reflected this by dictating that a captured knight had to
surrender his horse and armor to his captor. It was the lure of loot as much as
the hope for fame and honor that produced the “tournament circuits” of the 12th
to 14th centuries, where knights traveled from tournament to
tournament like modern-day professional athletes. But the fortunes made on the
tournament fields were a pale imitation of what “real” ransoms could bring.
A man taken in
battle by his enemy was completely at the mercy of the victor, and the stakes
were impossibly high; the victor was within his right to slaughter or (if non-Christian) enslave his
opponent. The custom of ransom dramatically decreased casualties, because the
prospect of financial gain greatly increased the proclivity of victorious
fighting men to show mercy toward those who surrendered to them. This had the
unfortunate side-effect, of course, of making the lives of wealthy men more
valuable than the lives of the poor. As a result, throughout the High Middle
Ages there was a tendency for those of a class deemed good for ransom to escape
death, while their less fortunate followers paid the price of defeat with their
lives.
But ransoms were
not fixed and so not immutably tied to rank and title. They were always
negotiable, and a rich merchant’s son — assuming he had enough time to describe
the size of his father’s purse to his erstwhile murderer — stood as good if not
a better chance of being granted the privilege of ransom than a poor knight.
Ransoms were always based on what a man (or his family) could pay quite simply
because there was no point in setting a price that one could not hope to
collect — unless the real intent was to ensure the captive could never again
raise arms against you.
Had Philip II of
France, for example, held Richard the Lionheart captive instead of the Holy
Roman Emperor, it is probable that he would have set demands intended to keep
Richard in a dungeon for the rest of his life.
Likewise, the ransom set for John “the Good” of France after he was
captured at the Battle of Poitiers was dictated far more by the political
advantage of denying the French a rival king to Edward III than by thoughts of
monetary gain. Except where kings and important nobles were at stake, however,
ransoms were generally dictated by a captive’s ability to pay.
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| Every castle had its gloomy, windowless places... |
By which, of
course, I do not mean the captive himself, for he was just that — held captive.
Ransoms were usually raised by a captive’s relatives — parents, wives,
siblings, children. If they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) scrape together the funds
needed, then the appeal would go to cousins and in-laws, anyone who might have
money and care enough for the captive to contribute to the cause. Lucky men,
who enjoyed the respect of those more powerful and wealthy than themselves,
might also be ransomed by their feudal overlord. Examples of this were the
payment of Aimery de Lusignan’s ransom by King Amalric, or William Marshal’s ransom
by Queen Eleanor. In the case of captive kings and barons, of course, they did
not have to rely on the generosity of those that loved or respected them. They
could demand contributions from their subjects, vassals and tenants.
Usually a man was
held in captivity until the ransom was paid, and conditions varied. Some men
enjoyed comfortable “house arrest,” able to interact with the household and
even family of the man to whom they had surrendered. Others were kept locked in
a single room, even a dungeon. In the worse cases, prisoners were kept chained
the walls of their prison until the ransom was paid. On rare occasions, a man (of high rank
generally) might be freed on parole in order to enable him to better collect
the sum owed. Famous cases of this were Baldwin of Ramla, who was released by
Saladin after payment of only a small portion of the enormous ransom set, and
Bertrand du Guesclin, who the Black Prince paroled so he could raise his
ransom. The former talked the Byzantine Emperor into paying the outstanding
portion of his ransom, and the latter raised his ransom from the King of France,
Louis d’Anjou and Henry of Trastamare.
While the payment
of a ransom could financially ruin a man and his family, ransoms could make the
fortune of those fortunate enough to take a valuable prize. At the Battle of Poitiers, English and
Gascons almost tore the French king apart in their eagerness to lay claim to
his ransom. Desmond Seward describes the situation like this in his history of
the Hundred Years War ( The Hundred Years War: The English in France,
1337-1445, Macmillan, New York, 1978):
[King John] was recognized and surrounded by
a great crowd of soldiers anxious to take so fabulous a ransom. Although he
surrendered to a knight of Artois, he was still in peril, for the brawling mob
of Gascons and English began to fight for him. Finally he was rescued by the
Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham, who took him to the Prince [of Wales].
Few men had a
share of a king’s ransom, but as long as a man was on the winning side, it was
possible to accumulate a small fortune from the ransoms of lesser men. Ransoms
more than plunder was what made the Hundred Years War so lucrative for England —
and impoverished France. The latter was in part due to the fact that because a
ransom was a reflection of a man’s ability to pay, it was also indirectly a
reflection of his “worth.” The English soon learned that it was to their
advantage to let French captives name their own ransoms because pride often
induced the prisoners to name ransoms suited more to their self-image than the
size of their pocketbook. Even the Black
Prince used this tactic when setting the ransom for Guesclin; the latter named
the huge sum of 100,000 francs, something he could not possibly have raised
from his own resources, hence the resort to the King of France et. al.
Related (Dr. Schrader)
Yet common as
ransoms were throughout the High Middle Ages, they remained a privilege not a
right. The Knights Templar, for example, explicitly prohibited their members
from paying ransoms. A Knight Templar was expected to die for Christ and find
salvation for his soul in that act of martyrdom. This may have contributed to
the Saracen tendency to slaughter captured Templars and Hospitallers; they had
no monetary value and so eliminating them sooner rather than latter made sense.
Normally,
however, it was the circumstances in which the victor found himself, not the
ideology of the captive, that determined whether a ransom would be accepted or
not. In the heat of battle, many soldiers were overcome by “blood lust” that
utterly obliterated their greed for gold. Or, when the battle was not one
between mercenaries but between true adversaries, fighting men might simply
hate their opponents too much to be willing to grant mercy. There were also
times when commanders made a strategic decision to kill prisoners. A famous
case in point here was Henry V’s order to kill the French prisoners taken at
Agincourt. Underestimating the demoralizing effect of his initial successes, Henry
V felt he needed every Englishman on the frontline, ready to repel the next
attack by the still numerically superior French, and was unwilling to spare men
to guard the prisoners.
Even more
significant, however, is that by the Wars of the Roses commanders were
beginning to prefer annihilation of the enemy’s ability to fight over the
profit gained from ransoms. It is a clear indicator of the increasing hatred
between the rival factions for the English throne that Edward IV allegedly told
his soldiers to “kill the lords and spare the commons.” Edward IV recognized
that the commons might not pay monetary ransoms, but they were his subjects and
he gained nothing by killing them. The rebellious lords, on the other hand,
were the threat to his throne.
In the subsequent century, as warfare became
increasingly tied to religion and kings became increasingly despotic, the
notion that an opponent might be allowed to live in exchange for a payment of
money became discredited. Ransoms became anachronistic and eventually
disappeared from the customs of Western warfare altogether.
