Prigionia di guerra nel medioevo. Un’altura in mezzo alla pianura

Tens of thousands of war captives were integral to medieval Europe’s history, but from a markedly vulnerable position. Yet these ubiquitous marginal figures are usually absent from the historiography on the era’s ‘others’, which tends to focus on inmates of physical institutions (hospitals, prisons, mental asylums, almshouses, leprosaria, women’s reformatories), or semi-segregated groups such as prostitutes and Jews, with occasional glances at (often foreign) soldiers-turned-brigands who turned their swords on locals. Hannelore Zug Tucci’s vivid study, situated mostly in the world of the Italian city-republics of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, offers a major—if somewhat inadvertent—corrective. The book richly illustrates war captives’ experiences, demonstrating how familiar and common they were, as a regular item on political elites’ agendas, the target of organised charity and the object of local entrepreneurs. The book can be divided into two main sections. The first three chapters deal with the criteria for, and debates about, the status of war prisoners or hostages in the Middle Ages. The category of those who could be legally ‘given quarter’ was strikingly broad, with very few exemptions, namely for pilgrims and official ambassadors, but not for women and clergy. Here, as throughout the book, the author marshals a broad range of sources and moves ably and carefully between chronicles, letters, jurisprudence, administrative records, prose fiction and poetry in Latin, (Middle) French, German and of course Italian. (For documents out of print, she draws predominantly on the Venetian archives.) Her recourse to secondary literature is similarly impressive, expanding the coverage beyond Italy and engaging modern approaches to prisoners of war. Rare omissions include the work of Jean Dunbabin (2002), Jarbel Rodriguez (2007) and Megan Cassidy-Welch (2011)

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