Meier, Frank: Gewalt und Gefangenschaft im Mittelalter. (Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Forschung). Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 2022.

Frank Meier is Professor of Medieval History, Early Modern History and Didactics of History at the University of Education in Karlsruhe. He received a PhD from the University of Constance for a dissertation on the urban expansion of this same city during the Middle Ages.

Meier’s monograph “Gewalt und Gefangenschaft im Mittelalter” was published in the series “Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Forschung“, which is meant to provide introductory works to relevant historical topics. His book aims at outlining the topic of martial violence in warlike contexts in the geographical area dominated by Latin Christendom during the “long Middle Ages”. By this, the author understands the period from Late Antiquity to the first decades of the Early Modern Period. At the same time, Meier lets his narrative be guided by the programmatic question, whether the progressive juridification of warfare went hand in hand with a decrease in the brutality of armed conflicts in the respective area and period (pp. 7–10). The author approaches this task by discussing three sub-questions in five chapters.

Meier dedicates the first two chapters to an evaluation of his first sub-question on whether “‘civilised’ rules and normative guidelines” were meant to limit armed violence effectively and whether they were able to do so (pp. 8). The first chapter concerns the relation between Christendom and violence (pp. 11–34). Meier starts by discussing the conflicting views on warfare conveyed by the very warlike Old Testament and the mostly peaceful New Testament, as well as their influence on Christian perceptions of violence. He continues by detailing the emergence of the idea of ‘just war’, touching briefly on its pre-Christian roots in Roman Antiquity, before sketching its development in Christian theology up until Thomas Aquinas. According to Meier, this concept of ‘just war’ also formed the basis for the crusade idea. He closes by asserting that, even though clerics such as Fulcher of Chartres and Gerhoch of Reichersberg criticized martial violence in general, their view was not very influential, as even bishops frequently went to war.

The second chapter addresses “ideals and laws” that were meant to limit martial violence (pp. 35–66). Meier starts by looking at knightly values that amounted to a code of conduct that emerged in the first half of the 12^th century in France and subsequently spread throughout Latin Christendom. This code of conduct only applied to other knightly combatants, although it is debatable whether single-combat between mounted aristocratic warriors really dominated European warfare, as the author claims (p. 41). Meier goes on to discuss feud law that was meant to regulate small scale warfare, which was conducted mainly by aristocrats who wanted to enforce their perceived rights. He subsequently widens his focus to the Peace of God movement, put forward by clerical actors since the 10^th century. Finally, he deals with secular codified laws of war that jurists, who were influenced by canonical law, wrote up from the 14^th century onwards. The author argues that neither of these ideals and laws succeeded in curbing martial violence, particularly against non-combatants, because they essentially emanated from the group that was responsible for it: the aristocracy (p. 64).

In the following third chapter, Meier seeks to prove this failure in regulating medieval warfare by investigating the assumed reality of “unlimited martial violence” (pp. 67–105). He follows up the second sub-question posed in his introductory chapter, on whether particular contexts made exceptional violence more likely (S. 8). The author focusses on the wars of the Swiss against Habsburg and Burgundian armies, as well as on the wars between the peasants of Dithmarschen, the counts of Holstein and the kings of Denmark in the Later Middle Ages. Thereby, he identifies one such particular context in what he defines as “struggles for freedom”. In the rest of the third chapter, the author discusses specific forms of exceptional violence, namely the killing of non-combatants and the destruction of cult objects. An interesting aspect here is the challenging task of identifying individual perpetrators of these acts. Although Meier adds some earlier examples to this discussion, most of the source material used stems from the Later Middle Ages.

Meier devotes the fourth chapter to his third and last sub-question, which refers to the treatment of prisoners of war (pp. 107–150). He makes the point that prisoners of war that were considered as belonging to “foreign tribes” or “ethnicities” and as “enemies of faith” (p. 107) were massacred more frequently than others. This seems to indicate that inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts provided further contexts in which exceptional violence became more likely than usual. Meier furthermore differentiates between high- and low-ranking prisoners and the practices of their treatment – the main reason for this distinction is the fact that the former were much more likely to be taken prisoner, instead of killed on the spot, due to their ability to pay a ransom. The fifth chapter is to be seen as an appendix to the preceding chapter. It furthermore makes evident the introductory character of the book, as it retells four ego-documents and self-testimonies of historical prisoners of war (pp. 151–184). They concern the captivities of Jean de Joinville after the failed crusade of King Louis IX of France in 1250, of Johannes Schiltberger after the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, of Jörg of Nürnberg after fighting in Bosnia in 1460, and the abduction of Hieronymus Baumgartner in 1544/1545.

Meier concludes that “the extent of violence” in medieval warfare depended “decisively on the respective situational context”, whereas the social and juridical progress as such had significantly less influence here (p. 192). Meier succeeds in making plausible that a gap existed between normative thinking about violence on the one hand and the practices of violence on the other. All in all, the monograph accomplishes its intended role as an introductory reading to the topics of violence and captivity, not least because it includes many direct quotations of sources in translation.