Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (review)

Jarbel Rodriguez's book is a welcome addition to the renewed interest in captivity and ransom in medieval societies, a hitherto somewhat neglected topic in the military-social historiography of the period. Roughly divided into two parts, the division between the vicissitudes of the captives and their saviors makes for a useful organizational principle. The epilogue examines the captives' rehabilitation and reintegration into their societies following their release.

Chapter 1, "Falling into Captivity," attributes this phenomenon in the Aragonese arena mostly to raids or piracy. Friars and other religious functionaries, including members of the ransoming orders, were also exposed. In its description of the gruesome conditions of captivity, the second chapter, "Life in Captivity," adds little of note. The universality of descriptions of chains, shackles, hard work, and undernourishment and their incorporation into a literary genre are well known (pp. 62–64). Rodriguez's attempt to use every scrap of information at his disposal leads to some mistaken attributions; for example, his identification of the chained and shackled Christian captives visited by Franciscans as Iberians (p. 44 n. 26) fails to take into account that c. 1320 most captives in Egypt would probably still have been prisoners of war from the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.

The book's second part turns to the liberation of captives. Here the author attributes to the crown of Aragon the development of one of the most elaborate ransoming systems in Christian Europe by the fourteenth century, with private ransomers (family), crown and ecclesiastical officials, merchants, sea captains, and ransoming orders working in conjunction. The party acting on behalf of the captive usually made an advance payment, ordinarily about half the sum, and the ransom agreement included stipulations as to how and when the rest of the money would be paid. A captive could spend years, even decades, however, awaiting the next ransoming expedition. Rodriguez's treatment of the technical aspects of ransom, such as prices, negotiations, and the safety of return, is meticulous and puts the Spanish archives to good use.

The concluding chapter switches from historical narrative to anthropological description. Relying on Victor Turner and Arnold Van Gennep, it portrays the return from captivity as a liminal phenomenon, shedding light on the ceremonies of thanksgiving as well as the public rituals that served to reincorporate the captives into the Christendom from which they had been absent for so long. The rites defined the transition from the status of one who had been away to that of one who has returned. Marching together under the crosses, Marian images, and the royal pennons gave coherence to a varied group that included monarchs, nobles, clerics, common soldiers, and captives, culminating in a public Mass—symbolizing incorporation into Christianity.

The book focuses on Aragonese society as a "society organized for ransoming." Its claim that the diverse ransomers—the captive's family, the crown, the ransoming orders, the municipal officers, and the Church—all worked in a complementary fashion to help captives gain their freedom is perhaps over-simplified. It contrasts with crusader society in the Latin East where these sectors were usually mutually exclusive and a development from private to institutional responsibility can be traced. In the epilogue Rodriguez shows that this harmonious Aragonese communal effort often broke down into petty rivalries.

Another noteworthy feature of the book is how Rodriguez draws the reader's interest by starting each chapter with a story or rather a snapshot of a situation. Especially effective in the opening chapter, for the next two chapters the repetitive, schematic structure becomes a little tiresome. In the second part, from chapter 4 onward, the author varies the pattern. When he returns to this technique in the epilogue, it serves him well as a tool for the analysis of a fourteenth-century ritual to facilitate the captives' reintegration into society. Overall, Rodriguez's useful analysis of captivity and ransom in Aragon adds another significant...